Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Howel]

I love that "Eric Trump" keeps spamming with this exact email:

Literally every single day I get the notice that they'll match my donation at 500% but only because Eric begged daddy to give me one more hour. Rofl.

Why is that so reminiscent of stuff a prosperity preaching church would send you?

[Howel]

Grifters gonna grift.

I guess so.

[cubby]

So i was thinking about the whole cancel culture thing trump wants to make the centerpiece of his campaign
(its mostly an online thing and people off twitter seem to rarely talk about it or notice it)
if there was a law that said for any employee cannot be fired for any speech because if they are its a 1st amendmant violation and DOJ is going to sue you
all of those cops fired for saying the N word/posting racist memes on facebook
it would be illegal to fire them
You have a cashier whos rude to customers? illegal to fire, protected speech
Nurse who says she hates old people on facebook? protected speech
Seems like as a matter of policy it is better to allow business to fire people for speech
than to change the law just to protect tech bros like james damore and journalist who make 6 figures
Is my point a strawman? tell me in which ways its wrong

While Trump might want that to happen, the First Amendment won't work that way, and SCOTUS rulings would prevent the "cancel culture" speech from being protected. The essence of the argument is that the first amendment protects a person's speech from government censure, but NOT speech in a private setting, such as at work, or on Twitter. So a law that made it illegal to fire someone for being "rude" wouldn't get past the courts, and wouldn't be enforceable because the law suits would be filed to bring someone back or receive damages from already being fired.

So Trump can try, but it won't work.

- - - Updated - - -

You absolutely can protect against such firings. There is no constitutional block on employee protections.

The Republicans just don't want to. They're largely anti-employee and pro-employer, and have been the primary proponents of the "right-to-work" style legislation that has essentially stripped worker protections to virtually zero in a significant number of states.

You actually cannot. Remember, the First Amendment protections are from government intrusion, not private intrusion.

[Skulltaker]

I am going to be really impressed if a mob can pull that one down. I hope nobody skipped arm day, because it looks kind of heavy.

1150 metric tons, aproximately. Assuming they managed to tear it down a decent chunk of them would simply get killed by debris. The statue is 38 meters high and on a pedestal, if it crashes on the ground debris would hurtle into the crowd at bone-crushing speed.

[draynay]

1150 metric tons, aproximately. Assuming they managed to tear it down a decent chunk of them would simply get killed by debris. The statue is 38 meters high and on a pedestal, if it crashes on the ground debris would hurtle into the crowd at bone-crushing speed.

It's a good thing Trump will protect it!

[Elegiac]

Sooooo....yeah. Looks like ICE just told students here on student visas that if their college is going online-only this fall, the students must depart the United States and cannot remain through the fall semester.



I bet this will make a lot of legacy donors from Harvard happy that a bunch of wealthy foreign students decide to just stop attending. /s Chalk up another one on the board of the right wing shooting itself in the foot by virtue of xenophobia.

[Thepersona]

Sooooo....yeah. Looks like ICE just told students here on student visas that if their college is going online-only this fall, the students must depart the United States and cannot remain through the fall semester.



I bet this will make a lot of legacy donors from Harvard happy that a bunch of wealthy foreign students decide to just stop attending. /s Chalk up another one on the board of the right wing shooting itself in the foot by virtue of xenophobia.

They are really dumb, arent they?

[Elegiac]

They are really dumb, arent they?

I am of the firm belief that being a racist makes you stupid and ugly. Call it "Twits Syndrome".

[Redwyrm]

Almost have to admire Trump's scorched earth policy when it comes to any voter that isn't old and white. Does Trump really think he can win elections with just white voters?

[PosPosPos]

I am of the firm belief that being a racist makes you stupid and ugly. Call it "Twits Syndrome".

Brings Mathilda and The BFG to mind. Hopefully the world can have an ending just like those books of Roald Dahl's.

[Benggaul]

Well, most of us knew it was coming...

Texas Doctor: I got 10 calls yesterday for young people who will die if they don’t get ICU support, but I only have three beds left.

[Elegiac]

Well, most of us knew it was coming...

Texas Doctor: I got 10 calls yesterday for young people who will die if they don’t get ICU support, but I only have three beds left.

Hey look, Trump's winning so much that he even got death panels instituted before Obama did. /s

[cubby]

Almost have to admire Trump's scorched earth policy when it comes to any voter that isn't old and white. Does Trump really think he can win elections with just white voters?

It feels like he's doing/accomplishing/planning one of two things:

1) Lashing out per his demented mind and little knowledge of the world, doing business as usual, and trying to distract from his increasing deplorable behavior and polls.
2) Long-con plan to keep COVID-19 active into the November election, allowing him to call a state of emergency, and canceling and/or "clamping-down" on the election, in an attempt to subvert the results.

[Edge-]

https://ftw.usatoday.com/2020/07/nas...stein-response

The culture war isn't going swimmingly. Drivers and teams, including Richard Petty, and NASCAR are all coming out in support of Wallace, again.

[Omega10]

I am actually pretty happy about all this. The GOP has been pulling out this "Culture War" bullshit for a long time, but Trump is managing to finally definitely lose it. Everything Trump touches dies, and he is managing to be extremely effective at losing this fight. I mean after three years of Trump, Nascar has banned confederate flags, Charleston pulled down its statue of John C. Calhoun by popular vote, Mississippi changed its state flag...

Even if you like what he is trying to do, you should vote against him just because he is so spectacularly bad at it.

His supporters are going out of their way to embarrass and humiliate him as well.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/aggressiv...143000127.html

Title: Aggressive anti-mask customers are forcing some restaurants to shut dining rooms to protect employees from abuse

Some restaurants are shutting down or closing dining rooms back up after employees faced harassment and violence from anti-mask customers.

Restaurants in states, including Texas, California, and Michigan, have announced plans to once again shutter dining rooms due to rude customers who refused to wear masks.

Hugo's Taco closed both of its locations in Los Angeles in late June due to combative customers who refused to wear masks.

"Staff have been harassed, called names, and had objects and liquids thrown at them," Hugo's Tacos said in a statement posted on social media. "A mask isn't symbolic of anything other than our desire to keep our staff healthy."

Disgusting

And...

https://news.yahoo.com/social-media-...090038555.html

Title: Social media backlash forces Trump to find new ways to spread his message

Trump threatened Twitter and Facebook for not allowing him the complete freedom to publish lies and words of hate.

Donald Trump’s campaign manager sent a warning to Twitter last month, weeks after the social media company first took steps to add labels and context to the president’s often inflammatory tweets.

“Hey @twitter, your days are numbered,” Brad Parscale wrote in a tweet, linking to one of his posts on the much lesser-known social media site Parler.

Trump is trying to use his Presidential power to win this battle by force.

Trump signed an executive order targeting social media companies in late May, days after Twitter added a fact-check to two of his tweets about voting by mail. The order was aimed at rolling back a legal shield for online platforms contained in the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and the justice department has since issued a recommendation urging Congress to repeal parts of the law.

But those actions do not seem to have deterred social media companies in their effort to crack down on hate speech when it comes from the American president.

Snap, the company that makes Snapchat, announced last month that it would no longer promote Trump’s posts on its Discover channel because it did not want to “amplify voices who incite racial violence and injustice by giving them free promotion on Discover”.

Even Facebook, the social media company that has generally been most lenient with the president, said it would start removing posts that incite violence or seek to suppress voting, with no exceptions for politicians. Days before that, Facebook took down Trump campaign ads that included a symbol associated with the Nazis, saying the ads violated the company’s policy against “organized hate”.

They may have an alternative.

The Trump campaign is looking at alternative ways to reach voters. A number of Trump’s advisers and allies have now joined Parler, the Twitter rival, and the campaign has increasingly used its own smartphone app to provide supporters with news and entertainment that is favorable to the president.

But this has its own set of challenges. Including the fact that many Trump supporters are not nice people.

But other platforms simply cannot match the reach of social media giants like Facebook and Twitter.

The CEO of Parler, who has described the platform as “an open town square with no censorship”, said late last month that the number of Parler users had quickly climbed to 1.5 million. In comparison, Facebook and Twitter have 175.4 million and 53.5 million US users respectively, according to the market research firm eMarketer.

“There is no replacement for Facebook. There basically is no replacement for Twitter,” said David Karpf, a professor in the school of media and public affairs at the George Washington University. “If they move to these smaller sites, what they’re going to find is, ‘Well, this doesn’t have the audience.’”

Gautam Hans, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, added that social media companies touting a “no censorship” policy had previously become overrun with violent and hateful rhetoric, which could quickly force Parler to develop a content moderation policy. “And then basically you’re back where you were four months ago on Twitter,” Hans said. “You’re not going to be able to avoid these problems. They’re unavoidable.”

Trump is changing a lot of the rules of society. Restrictions and regulations that in the past were not needed because certain things people just did not DO are now necessary.

[Edge-]

But this has its own set of challenges. Including the fact that many Trump supporters are not nice people.

No, it's a "conservative" thing. Parler is not the first "free speech" alternative social media site by a longshot, and it won't be the last. They always run into the same problems.

Nobody wants to pay to use them, they're used to free, ad-supported social network sites.
Advertisers don't want to advertise there, there just aren't enough people, the engagement metrics are likely low, and the content that is allowed on there goes against what many brands publicly say they value.
They don't have the money for massive user acquisition pushes, so they're reliant on people on "legacy" social media sites like Twitter to advertise for them.
They run into problems with the content they host.

Case in point, Gab. It ran into all those problems as a smaller startup, culminating with an internal revolt sparked by them pulling down two antisemetic images in order to maintain their access to Azure cloud services. Which was a part of the initial agreement they signed for those services to begin with - https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/28/1...h-gab-shutdown

And Parler is running into similar problems, banning "leftists" for being lefties. Because for all these sites it's never been about "free speech", but "their speech", which is largely analogous to hate-speech.

[Polyxo]

Well, most of us knew it was coming...

Texas Doctor: I got 10 calls yesterday for young people who will die if they don’t get ICU support, but I only have three beds left.

I'm convinced there's something neurological going on in people that tend to be conservative that doesn't allow them to understand the concept that the major issue is there being a lot of people needing hospital care at once, and that 'it only kills old people' really generally mostly applies if there's ample medical care for everybody. I explained it to people with PhDs that lean right, and they still didn't get it.

[Omega10]

No, it's a "conservative" thing. Parler is not the first "free speech" alternative social media site by a longshot, and it won't be the last. They always run into the same problems.

Nobody wants to pay to use them, they're used to free, ad-supported social network sites.
Advertisers don't want to advertise there, there just aren't enough people, the engagement metrics are likely low, and the content that is allowed on there goes against what many brands publicly say they value.
They don't have the money for massive user acquisition pushes, so they're reliant on people on "legacy" social media sites like Twitter to advertise for them.
They run into problems with the content they host.

Case in point, Gab. It ran into all those problems as a smaller startup, culminating with an internal revolt sparked by them pulling down two antisemetic images in order to maintain their access to Azure cloud services. Which was a part of the initial agreement they signed for those services to begin with - https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/28/1...h-gab-shutdown

And Parler is running into similar problems, banning "leftists" for being lefties. Because for all these sites it's never been about "free speech", but "their speech", which is largely analogous to hate-speech.

Thanks for the extra details here. I was wondering if this was a real option for them. In a word - no. Probably, if they moved forward with this plan, then them leaving Twitter and Facebook would end up being a huge victory for both Twitter AND Facebook.

[cubby]

No, it's a "conservative" thing. Parler is not the first "free speech" alternative social media site by a longshot, and it won't be the last. They always run into the same problems.

Nobody wants to pay to use them, they're used to free, ad-supported social network sites.
Advertisers don't want to advertise there, there just aren't enough people, the engagement metrics are likely low, and the content that is allowed on there goes against what many brands publicly say they value.
They don't have the money for massive user acquisition pushes, so they're reliant on people on "legacy" social media sites like Twitter to advertise for them.
They run into problems with the content they host.

Case in point, Gab. It ran into all those problems as a smaller startup, culminating with an internal revolt sparked by them pulling down two antisemetic images in order to maintain their access to Azure cloud services. Which was a part of the initial agreement they signed for those services to begin with - https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/28/1...h-gab-shutdown

And Parler is running into similar problems, banning "leftists" for being lefties. Because for all these sites it's never been about "free speech", but "their speech", which is largely analogous to hate-speech.

Thank you for the summary on this issue - I had always wondered how those snowflake social media sites for neo-con racist asshats turned out. Looks like they are getting exactly what they deserve.

[Zan15]

Good to see the PPP is just a huge cluster fuck.


So what ever happen to separation of church and state....Guess having to pay taxes is a NO NO, but getting tax payer funds is fuck ya!!


https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/06/coro...-released.html


The Archdiocese of New York got a loan valued at between $5 million and $10 million, while the Catholic Charities of the Archdioceses of San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New Orleans and Boston, among others, all received assistance valued at more than $2 million.

Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in New Jersey, which is named after Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner’s grandfather, got a loan in the range of $1 million to $2 million. Jared Kushner’s parents’ family foundation supports the school, NBC News reported.




LOL conservative media....The Washington Times got at least $1 million....

LOL Moscow Mitch....Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao’s family’s business, Foremost Maritime, got a loan valued at between $350,000 and $1 million. Chao is the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

- - - Updated - - -

Oh and Trump continues to be good luck to anyone involved.


https://www.tmz.com/2020/07/06/corey...it-road-wreck/

NASCAR'S COREY LAJOIE
'TRUMP 2020' CAR WRECKED
Just 16 Laps Into Brickyard 400

LaJoie was caught up in the middle of the mess ... and his "Trump 2020" car didn't survive -- suffering too much damage in the wreck to keep racing.