Is this where CBS journalism standards are in 2025?

Granted, I am on the downhill slide of life so perhaps this has changed, but in the USA sitting presidents are labeled with their title of office. I do not ever recall CBS political newscasters and commentators saying, "Mr. Clinton spoke to Congress today" or "Mr. Bush held a press conference".
You can drop the title for brevity and just say "Obama"; but if you use a title when referring to someone acting in their official capacity, it isn't "Mr. Obama".

Did style guidelines change recently, or does CBS now stand for Columbia Bias System?

In summary, you now stipulate:
1) You understood perfectly well what he said. Just like all the rest of us understood perfectly well what he said.
2) Nevertheless, you made a choice to parse the statement in the most extreme ragebait way possible and then argue with him for your parsing.
3) To that end, instead of directly quoting him in a meaningful, you began posting that he said the words you chose to parse -- "we'll actually like it that the kid was killed" -- rather than what he actually said even though you admit that you in fact understood.
4) When asked who said "we'll actually like it that the kid was killed", you at first continue to insist on your chosen re-wording and argue with people who understood what was said.
5) Now you pivot to say you also understood it, but the combination of certain trigger words was.the real problem.
6) Then you finish with both owning and disowning your original statement, by explaining that the wording would be problematic to some hypothetical roomful of other people, and that everyone here on slashdot who understood perfectly well what he was saying, should go "Argue with them".

So you have an argument to make, and you make it across several posts, but when anyone challenges your willful mis-parsing of the original comment, you switch to saying it's not your argument and we should go find and argue with the people who might make that argument. Okay, then why make the argument here on slashdot at all? This isn't the Senate floor or a shareholder earnings press release. We're just people talking to other people. What's the benefit of having people language-police their everyday statements for every hypothetical edge case?

Let's simply end the thread and award you the good citizenship ribbon for defending:
theoretically-triggerable feelings of
hypothetical people
who aren't here to react to
a statement that nobody here made.

Man, I feel like that pretty much sums up 95% of social criticism on the Internet these days.

Correct.

I read the entire thread. I didn't see the post he refers to that said we'll actually like it that a kid was killed.

Link to that post, please. I don't see it, and I browse at -1 Full.

So did Senator Cotton constructively propose some kind of amendment that would set the change to occur in February 2026, giving everyone plenty of warning?
Or did he just block this to destroy any forward movement on the subject?

Yes, the current script for AI implementation is completely backward from the reality.

Humans are like the frogs in the fable who cry out to the gods for a king to rule over them (i.e. be at the top of the "pyramid of trust and control"), then are dismayed and feel wronged when the gods send a stork who is verrrry happy to rule the soft tasty frogs.

We have vestigial C-suites and Senators and Houses Of Commonses because we take comfort being ruled over by gods who look sort-of like us. We are all desperately, deeply terrified of freedom and spend our lives coming up with narratives and systems to help us escape from freedom. We like to gripe about our vainglorious presidents and our senile Senators and our Vampire Lestat-styled corporate CEOs, but each revolution just becomes the new tyranny because subconsciously in order to function we need to believe that the world is ordered and someone is in charge, so the instant we successfully overthrow The Man we start making a series of choices that create the new "The Man". We will never choose freedom. We are not capable of it.

The LLM is the answer - not to eliminating the understanders - but to eliminating the bullet-point summarizers.
You still need the understanders to feed their reports and data to the LLM. An LLM without actual human understanding of its training set is a nothingness.
Thus, LLMs can more readily replace the C-suite and the Congresscritters. We all "vote" with our reports and data, and the LLM processes and summarizes the aggregate electorate (reporterate?), then responds with a project-management framework for implementing our desires and needs.

I've been quite negative in my esteem of this wave of "AI", but among the entities more untrustworthy than AI are corporate execs and United States Senators.

Makes sense. Executive work consists almost entirely of:
-reading reports.
-looking at charts.
-processing reports and charts and then making a choice based on clearly-stated criteria.
-going to meetings with other executives where you all discuss the choices you make (based on your direct-reports' reports).
-announcing the choices you made to employees and external PR outlets.

That's basically a list of LLM strengths in a nutshell.

C-suite folks are the reason AI hype will continue to build. It's because C-suite folks are already and always have been human LLMs. C-suite folks have always interacted with other people the way LLMs do. Think about it, their entire job consists of processing information just enough to issue a choice/announcement. They don't need to (and typically do not bother to) understand the issues on a deep, personal experience level -- that's a job for the underlings. Underlings are the human beings who have actual years of experiential true understanding. The underlings use their experience to write up their reports and collate the data to generate the charts that represent their understanding, then mouth-feed it to the little chirruping execs like a mama bird. Execs take all the pre-digested understanding, pick one or two token points that seem most important to their overall goals, and render a conclusion. Sound familiar?

That's why C-suite folks love AI and see it as the undeniable coolest best biggest yugest future. It feels warm and familiar to them. It does work and talks to them the exact same way they do work and the exact same way all their C-suite cadre talks. They will even be highly puzzled that the rest of their employees don't love AI, because the C-suite folks don't actually understand what their direct reports DO. And that's by organizational division-of-labor design. But that division makes everyone blind to experiences outside their own.

An LLM is merely a PHB that's been programmed to be nice to people. (at least so far)

Since you're resolute in your commitment to defining "speech" as "any and all behaviors and situations that are attached to the act of someone communicating", can you identify who are these "free speech absolutists" you are arguing against?

Like most older computer nerds, I have been discussing/arguing/debating various points of politics, religion, science, economics, sociology, etc. since the pre-GUI newsgroup and BBS days. I've heard (and at times in my life, proposed) passionate arguments for the most extreme sides to every issue. I have never in my entire life seen anyone seriously say Free Speech means you have the right to go to a playground and tell a 6yo child that their mommy is hurt and in the hospital and they need to get in your van so you can take them to see her. I have never in my entire life met anyone who argues that they have a 1st Amendment right to kidnapping.

That seems like, not quite beating a strawman, but perhaps beating a ghostman. It's easy to argue against a position no one holds. It makes me think I must be missing something to your position that would help me understand why this was important to bring up in a discussion thread where it didn't exist.

Was "money laundering" the charge?
IIRC it wasn't that he was laundering money, it's that his business did not comply with licensing requirements for his type of business, which includes instituting government-mandated anti-laundering systems. He failed to actively seek/stop/report potential laundering activity by his customers.

Your choice of how you define "speech" is new to me. It seems very strange and unworkable. I have never placed the border between "speech" and its "context" so far into the territory of context that context completely disappears from the evaluation and absolutely everything becomes "speech". With that framework, I can see how you would wish to oppose "free speech absolutism", because your framing doesn't differentiate "speech" from context - action, intent, motive, consequence etc. And therefore within your framework the phrase "freedom of speech" is doing some very heavy lifting indeed, bringing with it freedom of action, freedom of intent, freedom of motive, freedom of consequence. Clearly that would not result in a stable social/legal system. To me what you are talking about is not "free speech absolutism" but is some other thing. Off the top of my head I'd characterize the thing you've constructed to argue against as "free speech pan-liberationism", where all things become permissible so long as some form of speech occurs in conjunction with them. I have never met anyone who subscribes to such an expansive definition of "speech". Perhaps your arguments against them have already succeeded.

The reductiveness of your framework is most apparent when you say crime is "fine because that act is just words i.e. speech". Yes, your framing forces that conclusion because it subsumes every aspect of a scenario under "speech", and then, seeing nothing other than speech, all it can do is apply its one and only rule: "Speech must be free". Which is why it doesn't seem like a very useful framework for evaluating scenarios or arguing where the boundaries should be. It contains only one axiom and only one category of things to apply that axiom to.

With my shaved head and saffron robe on a busy downtown sidewalk, you walk past me. I hold out my bucket and say, "Please give me $100".
In grimy clothes and unwashed body reeking of alcohol, I stumble up to you in a busy tourist area and mumble, "Please give me $100".
In a dark deserted alley I walk up to you and say, "Please give me $100".
As you load your purchases into your car in a Walmart parking lot I jump out from behind another vehicle with a gun in my hand and say, "Please give me $100".

On your Facebook post restricted only to your friends, you say, "George W. Bush needs to die".
From your cave in Afghanistan you broadcast a video to all faithful Muslims with the fatwa, "George W. Bush needs to die".
At your Seattle militia gathering you hand a gun and $50,000 to an undercover FBI operative and say, "George W. Bush needs to die".

I am at a Red Bull booth at a public festival. You walk by. I offer you a cup of liquid and say, "You should drink this".
I walk up to you on the street and hand you a bottle of unmarked liquid and say, "You should drink this".
My name is Jim, we are in Jonestown, I hand your 8 year old child a cup of red liquid and say, "You should drink this".
You're at the ER for abdominal pain. The doctor thinks it's an ulcer and prescribes a liquid medicine to lessen your discomfort while you wait. The nurse comes in with a bottle and says, "You should drink this". Unfortunately for you, the nurse misread the order and grabbed the wrong medication. Also turns out you had appendicitis instead, and two hours later you're dead.

Within each scenario the act of speech is exactly the same. Your framework - which subsumes all other considerations under its broad definition of actions which count as speech - therefore has no choice but to conclude "If you believe in freedom of speech you must equate all these contexts, intents, actions, consequences, etc. and that all of these are equally permissible because 'those acts are just words i.e. speech'." Therefore your framework lets you cast the discussion as "free speech absolutists believe you can cause harm with impunity because you used words while causing harm".

I have known many radical "muh freeze peach" folks, but I have never met anyone who thinks all the above scenarios ought to be classified as - and evaluated for legal culpability as - merely acts of speech. That doesn't mean they don't exist, of course. But to me it seems like a strange choice for things to argue against; it'd be like making scientific arguments to disprove the totemic animism of an isolated village in New Guinea. You'd be correct, of course, but... uh. Okay?

Are those even examples of free speech scenarios?

Kidnapping someone is already illegal.
Giving someone poison is already illegal.
Assaulting someone or recklessly inducing someone into physical danger is already illegal.

There may in fact be a lost puppy over in the trees. It being truth doesn't make the subsequent kidnapping and abuse okay "because free speech". It was already not-okay regardless of whether the inducement method was a lie or truth or real candy or real video games.

There may in fact be a hurt puppy that needs help over in the trees. If you tell that to a sensitive 6 year old, and right behind those trees is a hidden steep decline that tumbles down to a fast-rushing river, you are going to be found guilty of negligent/reckless/manslaughter of a child by every jury in every courtroom in the USA. "But your honor, the puppy was real, I wasn't lying!" has exactly zero bearing on your legal culpability for your actions and the danger you induced.

Would it be okay with you if someone tells your young child that they are full of sin and a man named Jesus Christ was killed 2000 years ago, so unless they ask Jesus into their heart they will spend the rest of eternity screaming in pain as hellfire burns them but never burns them up?
Is that speech legal, or illegal?
Is that speech a lie, or a truth?
Does its legality have anything to do with its truth value?
Do you want the government - ie the majority of the current electorate - to be the arbiter of what is true/false and therefore what people are or aren't legally allowed to say?

Now take the same situation and tell your young child they are full of sin and a man named Jesus Christ was killed 2000 years ago so unless they get into your van and come to your church right now they will spend the rest of eternity screaming in pain as hellfire burns them but never burns them up.
Is that speech a lie, or the truth?
Is it legal, or illegal?
Does its legality have anything to do with the its truth value, or is its legality a function of the subsequent kidnapping?
Do you want the government - ie the majority of the current electorate - to be the arbiter of what is true/false and therefore what people are or aren't legally allowed to say?

This is a powerful data-tracking move for YT that will make them even more profitable.
Businesses would always rather have a consistent revenue stream that can be planned for and then gamed, rather than being at the mercy of consumer choices on any given day.

They now can know how much time John intends to spend consuming the feed. You are literally telling them in advance how large a window in the day they have to monetize your eyeballs. So instead of potentially missing the chance to serve x number of ads to John before John suddenly unpredictably exits the app, YT can now calculate ProfitTargetPerUser = JohnsDayLimit / SUM(ProfitEarnedFromAd[n]). All they need to do is have the algorithm check the value of John's limit and then adjust the value of n (ie the length of the interval they graciously allow you to see content between advertisements) to maximize profits.

This also improves the precision of their inducement PsyOps data analytics, because they can start deliberately testing John's weaknesses by observing what kinds of content they can stack toward the end of John's interval that is most likely to make John continue being monetized after clearing the popup notice. Knowing exactly how to induce people to break their own explicitly-stated rules/morals/willpower and continue behaviors a PsyOp wants them to perform, is an extremely profitable/powerful set of data.

Oh, and if no one else has realized this yet -- they've successfully moved everyone to streaming TV platforms, and everyone is so dopamine addicted that instead of TV itself being "the opiate of the masses", TV is a thing that people put on in the background while they dopascroll. Since you're streaming via an app or browser (which is tracking/harvesting you), that means they can now aggregate your side-scrolling monetized behavior with your TV-streaming monetized behavior to see exactly which shows you pay the most/least attention to, and eventually they will get around to what is the minimum level of writing/acting/talent/production investment necessary to keep you scrolling the rapidly disappearing seconds of your life away. It's also a great business opportunity to double-dip by gradually re-introducing and increasing the ads on paid streaming services while also showing you ads in your dopascroll, and even syncing those up so you're getting hit with ads on your scroll while getting ads on your stream. If they can just blanket you with enough ads then they can finally Immanentize the Eschaton/Singularity and ascend to the oligopantheon's geosat ringworld or whatever.

A honeycrisp apple and a granny smith apple and a washington red apple are all apples.
You can make a number of comparisons among them. The criteria you focus your comparison on determines the outcome of the comparison.

Take away the human word "apple" and judge on their characteristics.

If you compare them by size, shape, kind of plant they grow on, which portions are edible/inedible, and the color of the outside skin, then your comparison would conclude that they are all the same object other than the outside color. Therefore, when deciding which apple is the best to buy for your kid's lunches, you would logically conclude "Oh my kid's favorite color is red, so the red one is the best one".

If you compare them by sweetness, firmness, aroma, price, culinary use, and color of the inside flesh, then your comparison would conclude that they are almost completely different objects and only have the inside color in common. Therefore, when deciding which apple is the best to buy for your kid's lunches, you could logically conclude "Oh my kid loves sour candies and prefers crunchy things over mushy things, so I won't get the red one, and the granny smith is cheaper than honeycrisp, so granny smith is the best one".

The map is not the territory. The map is just one way of describing certain characteristics of the territory for a certain purpose. Comparisons using the phrase "first world" or "apple" implies that the existence of those categories is enough to render all comparisons equal. But they are not equal. The result of any comparison is always determined by which criteria you choose to look at, and also which criteria you choose not to look at.