Donald Trump the Megathread part II - mod warnings in OP, Updated 18/03/25

Meanwhile, Musk is over on *his* platform, parroting Russian propaganda, and getting schooled regularly

official Whitehouse account

Irrespective of where it is in the world we should never tolerate invasion and subjugation of a people

Because, if Putin is not stopped now, his territorial ambitions will lead to much worse conflicts. It's not difficult, unless you're an uncritical consumer of Kremlin propaganda.

There's also talks on bans on mRNA vaccines which Europe and Ireland should take advantage of. Bring the researchers here, create the university programmes required to develop these medicines and take Americans lunch. Most of their researchers are immigrants anyway. They don't seem to want them.

It's actually a pretty good idea that

Where do you think his next Territorial ambition would go?

I don't think Russia has the resources to invade anywhere, especially while Ukraine is ongoing, but also how many countries are physically left to invade beyond NATO and any other country with a military alliance

Some quick approximate military statistics courtesy of Mr. Google. Troop size and the 2024 budget

USA - 2.8m troops - $900bn

EU - 2m troops - €326bn ($340bn)

• Including $280bn just from Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Belgium, Finland and Romania

UK - 100,000 troops - £56bn ($70bn)

Russia - 1m troops - $140bn

Ukraine - 1.2m troops, $53bn (huge increase since 2022)

The only way I see Russia invading any other country is if US troops get sent in to back them up, not something I'd actually put past Drumpf. Even then it will be close!

Not that the reply to Musk is wrong or anything, but 'schooled' would imply learning something and if Musk had learned anything from even one percent of the rebuttals to his asinine Twitter thoughts over the last several years, he'd probably have different views from what he currently professes.

For big agitators like Musk and Trump, Twitter was never a place to hold a conversation. It's just a place to throw bombs. Say something crazy, sit back and get off on the buzz it generates, repeat.

The only way to truly school Musk on his platform would be for the user exodus to Bluesky to become total and leave Musk talking to himself.

Fair enough.

Replacing "schooled" with "humiliated" would work.

Humiliation would mean feeling shame and the feeling of shame would maybe force him to reconsider future actions, but I'm fairly sure based on past form that Musk is just going to do the same thing tomorrow if not later today.

Of the various ways that Trump/Musk could be brought down, none of them are via a reply on Twitter, no matter how snappy/insightful/correct it is.

Really depends on the base and the agreement with the host nation. Sometimes the US is leasing the land and paying themselves, sometimes they co-locate with the local military and pay some form of rent to them.

The White House posts a mock up of the President as the King.

*All the Americans in the after life who lived through and fought in their war of independence*

Twitter was never a place for anyone to hold a conversation. It has always been a platform for just spouting off and it was never designed for an actual conversation in the first place. Something like this site is far more suitable for conversational purposes. You can write more than a few hundred characters for a start and actually make an elaborate point and then continue further when responded to.

Twitter doesn't and never did have that ability to any real degree.

Frankly, I've been of the opinion that Twitter was always one of the worst things that's ever happened to the internet and now that that dickhead has bought it and is using it as a propaganda platform for the worst in society it's even more catastrophically bad.

Twitter has dumbed down internet discourse to a staggering degree. It was always a place where people just said something and then, effectively, checked out. But you can see that type of attitude in proper forums around the web too. People will spout off some crap and then get challenged on it and when they do they fall to pieces and start whinging about piles on's and whatnot because they aren't able to hold a normal conversation and are only interested in yelling their point or whatever point they've been massaged into on a given week.

Their "audit" is nothing more than looking at a list of expenditures and the title or description and deeming it to be invalid. There isn't a way in hell they could accurately audit government organisations this fast and that's why we're seeing lots of row back from what they claim when someone explains the reality.

They released some statement earlier this week claiming 8B in a cost for something or other. They had entered a type and the cost was just 8M. The announcement of the typo was a lot smaller than the announcement about the money being wasted as you'd expect.

But as you said, the lies are being lapped up and so the purpose of the exercise from Trumps and Musk' perspective has been met.

I'm sure that on a micro level, people have had conversations on Twitter. If people here remember the fundamentalist American cult, the Westboro Baptist Church, at least one former member, Meghan Phelps, credits Twitter exchanges as the catalyst for soul-searching that led to her leaving it entirely.

But I agree that on the macro level, the sides aren't really listening to one another. At that level, the perfect reply isn't really about changing minds on the other side. It's really about gaining status with your own side of the debate. Maybe you'll get 50 new followers and your reply screencapped on shared on Reddit's r/murderedbywords.

Exactly and inevitably it's always ends up as a shouting match with people trying to curry favour with others that already agree with them, no matter how absurd the point is.

Where Twitter was relatively useful was to engage with people in public life that you wouldn't otherwise be able to. That's assuming that they'd actually respond mind you, which often they don't. They're probably right not to in any case. There's far too many loons online and Twitter has become loon central in the last year or so.

It was mainly useful as an advertising tool which is why most companies etc used it. It offered a cheap way to blurb your latest movie, book, bit of junk or whatever to, literally, millions of people whether they followed you or not.

TBH though, I'd prefer to see the whole thing just die.