All purpose news and politics thread part VII: News & Politics Total Landscaping

[Tami]

More than likely, Trump will ignore that as well. He and/or his lawyers will scream bloody murder that his First Amendment rights are being violated, yadda yadda yadda. Also, it's not like he'll be arrested for violating the order, because he won't. That's for lesser folks like you or me.



I don't get it. What in hell is the worth in stock for an entity that serves no purpose other than giving Trump a platform to whine and bleat and bitch all day long. Could someone please explain this to me like I'm five?

Truth Social made Trump richer and gave him a new megaphone. But it’s struggling as a social media site

When he’s not raising horses or working at a construction site, 28-year-old Nick Mirtschink says he spends “a lot” of time on Truth Social, the social media platform started by Donald Trump.

So does Bree Duke, a retiree from northwest Georgia, who said she regularly checks in with Trump’s frequent posts, called “truths.”

“I love it,” Duke told CNN. “I have it on my TV, and I have it on my phone.”

Mirtschink and Duke shared their glowing reviews of the app while attending Trump’s recent rally in Rome, Georgia, where regular users of Truth Social were easy to come by. Outside of his MAGA movement, though, the social media site is struggling to find a wider audience. It is hemorr*****g users, and its traffic has plummeted. There were roughly 860,000 accounts active on the site as of November – a tiny blip compared with more mainstream platforms.

But as Trump’s foray as a social media mogul enters its third year, the app’s long-term viability – and purpose – remain unclear. Truth Social is not a serious threat to compete with, let alone eclipse, X, Facebook or YouTube – it’s not among the 100 most downloaded social media applications in the Apple App store – nor has it separated itself as their conservative alternative. Trump Media’s management warned last year that the company was at risk of insolvency without a merger, and most analysts are skeptical of its current valuation above $6 billion.

“It’s grossly overvalued,” Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida, told CNN this week. “It qualifies as a meme stock for which the price is divorced from fundamental value.”

Instead, the sky-high appraisal appears closely tied to Trump’s political comeback attempt. But Truth Social has not proved it can survive, let alone thrive, unless the nation’s gaze is affixed on the site’s most famous user.

“Truth Social’s clout is driven very much if not entirely by Donald Trump’s popularity,” said Josephine Lukito, who researches the intersection of politics and social media at the University of Texas at Austin. “Without him, I don’t think there’s a viable path forward for it.”

It should be called Trump Social, instead of Truth Social. It's like as if one of the influencers on Tik Tok or Instagram or YouTube had enough capital to create their own social media business devoted solely to themselves

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Truth Social made Trump richer and gave him a new megaphone. But it’s struggling as a social media site







It should be called Trump Social, instead of Truth Social. It's like as if one of the influencers on Tik Tok or Instagram or YouTube had enough capital to create their own social media business devoted solely to themselves

And, it's not like Trump tells the truth, only HIS version which, more often than not, turns out to be lies.

[CaptainEurope]

I don't get it. What in hell is the worth in stock for an entity that serves no purpose other than giving Trump a platform to whine and bleat and bitch all day long. Could someone please explain this to me like I'm five?

If you are a foreign power that wants Trump back in power, it has value to you. As bureaucracies decide slowly, I'm guessing we will see some buying activity by Thursday. Probably a concerted effort of investments in $DJT to make the stock go up and bring back other investors.

[Tami]

I Hope to Repeal an Arcane Law That Could Be Misused to Ban Abortion Nationwide - By Tina Smith - Ms. Smith is a Democratic senator from Minnesota and a former Planned Parenthood executive.

A long discredited, arcane 150-year-old law is back in the news in 2024, and that should terrify anyone who supports reproductive freedom. Last week at the Supreme Court, the Comstock Act of 1873 was referenced on three separate occasions during oral arguments in a case dealing with access to mifepristone, one of two drugs typically used in medication abortions.

Anti-abortion activists like to bring up the Comstock Act because one of its clauses prohibits sending through the mail “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” that could possibly lead to an abortion. Even if the Supreme Court doesn’t take the bait, a newly re-elected President Trump could order his Department of Justice to start interpreting that line to mean that it is illegal to mail mifepristone — a safe, effective, Food and Drug Administration-approved drug — to doctors and pharmacies, as well as to patients directly. The same could go for medical supplies that are used in performing surgical abortions. That could effectively make abortion impossible to access even in places like Minnesota, which has affirmatively protected a woman’s right to choose by passing reproductive freedom laws.

In response, I’m prepared to fight back — including by introducing legislation to take away the Comstock Act as a tool to limit reproductive freedom.

Let me take a step back and explain how ridiculous it is that we’re even talking about this legislative relic today. The Comstock Act hasn’t been broadly enforced since the 1930s. The Biden administration considers it utterly irrelevant. Many legal experts consider it dead letter law. And once you know its back story, it becomes clear why no one has paid much attention to it in nearly a century.

Back in the 1860s, a former Civil War soldier from rural Connecticut named Anthony Comstock moved to New York City for work. He was shocked and appalled by what he found. Advertisements for contraception! Open discussions of sexual health! It all struck Comstock as terribly lewd and anti-Christian.

So he made it his mission to clean up society, creating the loftily named New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and gathering evidence for police raids on places that distributed material he thought was obscene or promoted indecent living. In the early 1870s he took his crusade to Washington, lobbying for federal legislation that would empower the post office to search for and seize anything in the mail that met Comstock’s criteria for being “obscene,” “lewd” or just plain “filthy.”

In a fit of Victorian puritanism, Congress passed the Comstock Act into law. But it quickly became apparent that Comstock’s criteria were unworkably vague. In its broad wording, the law not only made it illegal to send pornography through the mail, it also outlawed the sending of medical textbooks for their depictions of the human body, personal love letters that hinted at physical as well as romantic relationships, and even news stories.

The whole thing was very silly and impracticable, and that’s why the Comstock Act was relegated to the dustbin of history.

But conservative activists recently revived it from obscurity as part of their playbook for a potential second Trump term:

[Gray Lensman]

I Hope to Repeal an Arcane Law That Could Be Misused to Ban Abortion Nationwide - By Tina Smith - Ms. Smith is a Democratic senator from Minnesota and a former Planned Parenthood executive.

The small "L" libertarian in me applauds anybody looking to repeal zombie laws like this. You never know when one could rear its ugly head and be used to take freedoms away.

[Malvolio]

Truth Social made Trump richer and gave him a new megaphone. But it’s struggling as a social media site







It should be called Trump Social, instead of Truth Social. It's like as if one of the influencers on Tik Tok or Instagram or YouTube had enough capital to create their own social media business devoted solely to themselves

I call it Troll Central.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

House Republicans want to rename Dulles after Trump

Something THAT stupid I expected to read yesterday (April Fool's Day), but, wow, this crap is serious! Talk about a master class from Qpublicans on slurping Trump!

[Dalak]

It's so gross that this is necessary.

Trump’s gag order in hush money case expanded to include judge’s family

He has to keep the base riled up and angry to keep the $ rolling in, so he has to keep finding targets to motivate the hate.

https://twitter.com/KatiePhang/statu...56914754879915

Gee, it's like they gave him a softball because a rich white man can't be sen to be humbled by fraud charges. Everything to do with Trump is so disillusioning.

I don't get it. What in hell is the worth in stock for an entity that serves no purpose other than giving Trump a platform to whine and bleat and bitch all day long. Could someone please explain this to me like I'm five?

If you are a foreign power that wants Trump back in power, it has value to you. As bureaucracies decide slowly, I'm guessing we will see some buying activity by Thursday. Probably a concerted effort of investments in $DJT to make the stock go up and bring back other investors.

I agree with Cap here, but add the following:

----

I Hope to Repeal an Arcane Law That Could Be Misused to Ban Abortion Nationwide - By Tina Smith - Ms. Smith is a Democratic senator from Minnesota and a former Planned Parenthood executive.

The small "L" libertarian in me applauds anybody looking to repeal zombie laws like this. You never know when one could rear its ugly head and be used to take freedoms away.

Hmmm, a vaguely worded ancient law easily misused by those who wish to abuse it? I'm sure it will be championed by conservatives high & low.

House Republicans want to rename Dulles after Trump

Something THAT stupid I expected to read yesterday (April Fool's Day), but, wow, this crap is serious! Talk about a master class from Qpublicans on slurping Trump!

Maybe we can use Trump named objects as a lesson - Don't be like this Orange Shitgibbon. Of course that would be long down the road after this man and the hate he's evoked conservatives to bring out into the daylight are soundly defeated and shown to be a losing philosophy.

[Jack Dracula]

Truth Social made Trump richer and gave him a new megaphone. But it’s struggling as a social media site







It should be called Trump Social, instead of Truth Social. It's like as if one of the influencers on Tik Tok or Instagram or YouTube had enough capital to create their own social media business devoted solely to themselves

It serves as a direct connection to his most loyal followers so he can easily fleece them with opportunities to buy merchandise and beg for donations. He can stoke their fears and outrage and hit them up for money. In that way it has value to not just him but Republican politicians like Greene and Gaetz.

[Tami]

It serves as a direct connection to his most loyal followers so he can easily fleece them with opportunities to buy merchandise and beg for donations. He can stoke their fears and outrage and hit them up for money. In that way it has value to not just him but Republican politicians like Greene and Gaetz.

Limited and very fragile value. If anything happens to Trump, anything takes him offline permanently, Truth Social would barely last one ScaramuccI.

[Mister Mets]

The small "L" libertarian in me applauds anybody looking to repeal zombie laws like this. You never know when one could rear its ugly head and be used to take freedoms away.

That's a valid point.

Laws that are dead letters can be resurrected, especially if something else changes.

As one stock analyst said of Truth Social , the stock for it is like GameStop's in 2021. How it exploded and fell to Earth leaving many to losses in the end. One claims the stock will fall to $2-3 a share.

I wonder the extent to which people will buy this because they like the idea of owning DJT at the stock market.

The valuation is not based on expected profits. There was a point that if you just compare Truth Social's revenue to anything else, it looks terrible.

Truth Social made $4.1 million in revenue in 2023. A typical CostCo warehouse has a revenue of $252 million per year, so this is stock for a company that generates less money in a year than a standard Costco warehouse makes in a week (I get that it's an imperfect comparison because CostCo has high operating costs, but then again Truth Social costs much more to run than it brings in.)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...0of%20products.

https://www.axios.com/2024/04/01/tru...l-revenue-2023

Where did I say I was a fan of the law? I must have missed that.

I didn't say you were a fan of the law.

As far as I can tell, you offered no opinion on it either way.

That said, a bad law is a bigger deal than an obnoxious celebrity.

When Mets ignores a post that he very recently replied to in order to make it out like I'm inconsistent, it's very clear he doesn't care about facts, presenting evidence, or focusing on the specifics. He'd rather mislead using outdated posts and claim he genuinely doesn't know things like how addition & subtraction work or what a post contains that he's replying to instead of admitting to how transparently dishonest he's being with every consecutive post. Another new double standard on display in claiming we should accept what mainstream media says without question, unless they report that Nex was murdered or how teachers in Florida are forced to pull books that haven't been approved by a Don't Say Gay law, or anything that shows the Bigotry on display by a conservative - then we shouldn't accept it because it's an exaggeration.

E: Daily Kos is trash for not updating their posts, but using outdated posts to slander another poster is perfectly acceptable to Mets? Who does he think he's kidding?

When I say The Week lied:

I didn't realize that post was your full thoughts on the matter- that's on me.

There's an obvious distinction between Daily Kos and a message board. An article is supposed to be definitive, to the extent possible. There will sometimes be descriptions of possibilities, but in general speculation is clearly marked. That was not the case in the Daily Kos article.

Comments on a message board are understood to be a snapshot of a moment. It's not promised as news. That said, people posting online should be more reserved and less confident, because it is bad to be wrong. If someone changes their mind, that's worth explaining.

I explained why I didn't think the writer was lying, and addressed most points, except perhaps whether we should treat the writer with suspicion for not being more critical of Shrier and Littman.

That gets to an interesting distinction I heard recently, between decouplers and contextualizers.

Decouplers tend to look at things that are said in isolation. Contextualizers tend to focus on the big picture.

I am generally more of a decoupler. it seems like it works better if you have discussions with people who have different views. Contextualizing makes more sense in extreme situations, but that doesn't seem to match the discussion.

I do still wonder about the disagreement about whether a reporter was obviously lying for listing people who are gender non-conforming in particular ways (IE- they identify as nonbinary, genderqueer, etc.) if they don't identify as transgender. Why does it matter from the perspective of misleading the public? The main explanation would be that there's an understanding that people who identify as agender but not transgender (as an example- this would apply to numerous other nonbinary designations) shouldn't be taken seriously, so any polls that include them are going to mislead normies, but that if they're willing to describe themselves as transgender, there's a different expectation in terms of long-term needs. That remains my sense of a potential subtext.

[Tami]

This is what happens to anyone who goes into business with Trump:

Trump sues Truth Social co-founders, says they're not entitled to stock shares

Former President Donald Trump has sued the co-founders of Truth Social, alleging they mismanaged the social media platform early on and should therefore lose their stock in the company, which recently went public.

In papers filed last week in Florida state court, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. argued that executives Wes Moss and Andy Litinsky made a series of costly mistakes that resulted in a long delay in the company’s going public and urged a judge to strip them of their shares in the company.

[ed2962]

Supposedly Kyle Rittenhouse did so poorly on the Marines Entrance exam that he's barred from trying again.

https://www.politicalflare.com/2024/...pplying-again/

There's got to be more to the story than this though. Especially with recruitment so low these days. I wonder if there isn't something more that he said or did that made them reject him permanently.

[zinderel]

Supposedly Kyle Rittenhouse did so poorly on the Marines Entrance exam that he's barred from trying again.

https://www.politicalflare.com/2024/...pplying-again/

There's got to be more to the story than this though. Especially with recruitment so low these days. I wonder if there isn't something more that he said or did that made them reject him permanently.

There’s the fact that he’s ‘Kyle Rittenhouse’. That should be enough to make any decent employer with a diverse workforce say, “we’re gonna pass.”

[PaulBullion]

Supposedly Kyle Rittenhouse did so poorly on the Marines Entrance exam that he's barred from trying again.

https://www.politicalflare.com/2024/...pplying-again/

There's got to be more to the story than this though. Especially with recruitment so low these days. I wonder if there isn't something more that he said or did that made them reject him permanently.

Per the article, he took the test six months before he shot and killed two men. So he was no infamous then. But it's possible that he talked too much about killing rabbits or something.