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I have been reading an article in the news, and could not understand the following sentence.

Vielmehr fehlt das politische Motiv, ein geopolitischer Wettkampf der Systeme wie einst bei Apollo, oder ein zwingendes Geschäftsmodell, mit sich der Einsatz so vieler Steuergelder als gewinnbringende Investition rechtfertigen ließe.

Isnt there missing dem after mit in last subordinate clause? I mean dem in a sense of dative of das, a relative pronoun for Motiv.

If not, could you please describe what happens in the last clause?

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    Yes, either mit dem or womit.
    – Harald Lichtenstein
    Oct 6, 2019 at 14:46
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    @user30167 On the plus side, you can congratulate yourself on successfully guessing the wright solution for this cloze test of sorts.
    – Dan
    Oct 6, 2019 at 14:54

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Yes, there should be „mit dem“. It's just German journalismus A.D. 2019 at its finest. In most media assets, even in largest such as der „Spiegel“, nobody ever cares to proofread articles. Sometimes one sees such weird typos, misspellings etc. that one would think not even the author had proofread their masterpiece.

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    Of cause nobody proofreads any more. Proofreading is time-consuming, and human working time is expensive. And since everything is written on text editors with a spell-check-function, proofreading by humans is not necessary any more (there might be some sarcasm in the bold part)
    – Volker Landgraf
    Oct 6, 2019 at 15:56
  • BTW, proofreading by the author - although better than no proofreading at all - is significantly less efficient than proofreading by someone else. As the author you remember your thoughts and intentions, so half the time you'll read what you wanted to write instead of what you actually did write.
    – Volker Landgraf
    Oct 6, 2019 at 16:07
  • I suspect that texts for print are occasionally shortened to fit the collumn constraints vs acceptable Textbild (whitespace distribution, avoidance of bad line breaks, Hurenkinder etc) at the cost of good orthography. I do so for space constrained internet comments at least. I don't know whether the cited piece was print first or word count constrained. An honest error is a real possibility, but such glaring omissions make one wonder for sure.
    – vectory
    Oct 6, 2019 at 16:28
  • @VolkerLandgraf "of cause" -- I see what you did there. Par for course, quid pro quo :)
    – vectory
    Oct 6, 2019 at 16:29
  • @vectory Ich benutze auch gerne mal den Begriff "Tuppfehler" um auf ebensolche hinzuweisen ;-)
    – Volker Landgraf
    Oct 6, 2019 at 16:34

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