Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Here we are two weeks after Kevin McCarthy was first removed as Speaker for the United States House of Representatives. About to have our first vote on the House floor to try and select the next Speaker.
It's been a bit of a tumultuous two weeks. At the beginning of last week Steve Scalise (R-LA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Kevin Hern (R-OK) announced their candidacy for Speaker. Hern subsequently dropped out before any internal polls of the conference had been done. Scalise won the initial round of internal Conference votes over Jordan on Wednesday 113-99. Over the course of Wednesday and Thursday around 20 Republicans came out as hard no's on Scalise, more than enough to deny him the Speakership. Scalise subsequently dropped out leaving Jordan as the presumptive candidate. On Friday, shortly before the internal Conference vote, Austin Scott (R-GA) declared his candidacy for Speakership though went on to lose the internal vote 124-81 to Jordan. While there have been subsequent developments indicating many of Jordan's critics have come around the margin in the House is so close there may still be enough to deny the Jordan the Speakership.
This is a presently ongoing event and I'll update as the situation develops and I am able.
ETA:
As of the time of this writing the first ballot is still being counted but five nine Republicans have voted for someone other than Jordan, meaning he will not be Speaker on the first ballot.
ETA2:
At the end of the first ballot the votes stand at:
212 - Jeffries
200 - Jordan
20 - Other
2 - NV
With 2 NV that means the total to win is only 216. House now in recess rather than another vote. This vote total is within a couple of votes of where McCarthy was for the first three days and eleven ballots in his Speaker campaign. Hopefully this one doesn't take so long.
ET3:
No more votes today, House has gone home.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Let's say that this reckoning mood last more than two weeks and the inevitable Israeli reaction on Gaza; It is possible that we are beginning to see a realignement from the upper middle class on immigration in general and on inclusion and diversity in particular?
I don't really understand how this paragraph connects to the first paragraph. "I am surprised by how some prominent people on the left are willing to excuse atrocities committed by Hamas, therefore immigration and DEI are bad." How does the premise connect to the conclusion? I don't think most left-ish people's support for immigration or DEI are premised on whether or not certain other leftists will excuse atrocities committed by Hamas.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
The problem is 20% of the electorate is not enough to make a winning coalition with. Ross Perot won nearly 20% of the popular vote in his 1992 presidential run, which did not translate into a single electoral college vote. Sure the third party candidate can play spoiler depending on how their voters are distributed, but for them to actually win is going to require peeling voters off the leading candidates somehow. So, what's the argument for voting Kennedy over Biden that isn't a better argument for voting Trump over Biden? What's the argument for voting Kennedy over Trump that isn't a better argument for voting Biden over Trump? What's the constituency any of these people are going to be able to entice to build a plurality coalition?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Strictly speaking there's nothing stopping them. If the House Republican Conference wanted to hold an internal vote for a candidate for Speaker and then expel from their conference any Member who voted against that candidate they could. The problem depends a bit on what you mean by "expelled". If you just mean expelled from their internal party in the House then it doesn't really help their candidate get any closer to Speaker and someone they've expelled is unlikely to work with them in the future. If you mean expelled from the House entirely it takes a two thirds vote of the House (so it can't be done purely internally) and the House Republican majority is so small they would be the minority party if they voted to expel all the people who voted to oust McCarthy.
The problem is that the majority the Republicans have in the House is very small. It takes 218 votes for a majority and they have 221 members. So if even three members don't like McCarthy they can effectively keep him from becoming Speaker or kill any legislation. At the beginning of the year there was a segment of the Conference that thought McCarthy was too weak on spending and so didn't want to elect him Speaker, which is why it took so many rounds. With supporting a CR this weekend at current spending levels those same members regard it as a betrayal of the promises he made to get their support to be Speaker, hence the present motion to get rid of him.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
The 10 or so RINOest RINOs in the caucus put up a RINO for speaker and the Democrats vote for him.
I have sometimes wondered if this would function the other way. There are, like, 10 House Republicans who were elected in 2022 in districts Biden won in 2020. I wonder if there's some angle where a few of them could be convinced to vote Jeffries for Speaker. It would only take four!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I suspect the Democrats would say McCarthy hit "defect" first by trying to pass a bunch of spending bills or CRs that departed downward from the spending levels agreed on in the debt limit negotiations earlier this year. It's not like McCarthy passed the clean CR because of loyalty to Dem priorities, it was either CR the Dems would vote for or government shutdown. On the other hand, I'm skeptical whatever Speaker comes out of this mess will be more palatable to Dems than McCarthy.
The whole situation is strange, with the majority's margin as small as it is. I almost wish the US had some mechanism to call snap elections like the UK does.
In the wake of the House of Representatives passing a Continuing Resolution maintaining current funding levels a group of Republicans, led by Matt Gaetz (R-FL), have filed a motion to vacate against Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). This is a motion that, if passed, would remove McCarthy as Chair of the House of Representatives after only nine months on the job. The reporting I'm seeing on Twitter says Democrats are united in supporting the motion, which means only three Republicans would need to join Gaetz for the motion to pass. I believe this would also be the first time in US history the House will have removed a Speaker with a motion to vacate.
What happens after that is anyone's guess. In a literal sense we move back to where we were this January and do another election for Speaker. Presumably Democrats are going to nominate and vote for Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) as they did then. It's not clear who on the Republican side would be a replacement for McCarthy. He still enjoys the support of a strong majority of Republicans, but the Republican majority is so small he needs basically everyone. His getting elected Speaker again would almost certainly need someone who voted to vacate to vote for him to Speaker. I'm skeptical there are promises McCarthy could make to the Republicans voting to oust him that could convince them to support him again. On the other hand I'm not aware of any consensus about who Republicans could be convinced to support except McCarthy. By far the funniest outcome, I think, would be the Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy abstaining in the Speaker vote, letting the Democrats elect Jeffries Speaker.
Vote on the motion is supposed to be held this morning though the House is currently debating other bills. You can watch the House Session on C-SPAN. Will update this post as the news develops.
ETA:
By a vote of 216-210-0 Kevin McCarthy becomes the first Speaker of the United States House of Representatives removed by a motion to vacate.
Vote breakdown by party (based on the vote on the motion to table, C-SPAN roll call doesn't break down by party):
| Ayes | Nays | NV | |
| Republicans | 8 | 210 | 3 |
| Democrats | 208 | 0 | 4 |
As expected McCarthy retains the support of the vast majority of his own Conference. I think the rule is the House can't do business without a Speaker so I imagine we go directly into elections for Speaker of the House now. Given the multiple days it took to elect McCarthy before I am not confident about any particular path forward from here.
ETA2:
Am hearing online that the Speaker pro tempore (selected by McCarthy when he became Speaker) may be able to function as Speaker indefinitely. They may not have to have an election for Speaker on any particular time table.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think part of it was an accounting error but it's an error that's ubiquitous in crypto: valuing your shitcoins at their spot price * volume. My understanding is a bunch of the loans from FTX to Alameda were "collateralized" by billions of dollars of other coins Alameda held. The problem comes when you need to turn those coins into dollars and find out the market is not as deep or liquid as you supposed.
Levine again:
And then the basic question is, how bad is the mismatch. Like, $16 billion of dollar liabilities and $16 billion of liquid dollar-denominated assets? Sure, great. $16 billion of dollar liabilities and $16 billion worth of Bitcoin assets? Not ideal, incredibly risky, but in some broad sense understandable. $16 billion of dollar liabilities and assets consisting entirely of some magic beans that you bought in the market for $16 billion? Very bad. $16 billion of dollar liabilities and assets consisting mostly of some magic beans that you invented yourself and acquired for zero dollars? WHAT? Never mind the valuation of the beans; where did the money go? What happened to the $16 billion? Spending $5 billion of customer money on Serum would have been horrible, but FTX didn’t do that, and couldn’t have, because there wasn’t $5 billion of Serum available to buy. FTX shot its customer money into some still-unexplained reaches of the astral plane and was like “well we do have $5 billion of this Serum token we made up, that’s something?” No it isn’t!
One simple point here is that FTX’s Serum holdings — $2.2 billion last week, $5.4 billion before that — could not have been sold for anything like $2.2 billion. FTX’s Serum holdings were vastly larger than the entire circulating supply of Serum. If FTX had attempted to sell them into the market over the course of a week or month or year, it would have swamped the market and crashed the price. Perhaps it could have gotten a few hundred million dollars for them. But I think a realistic valuation of that huge stash of Serum would be closer to zero. That is not a comment on Serum; it’s a comment on the size of the stash.
...
In round numbers, FTX’s Thursday desperation balance sheet shows about $8.9 billion of customer liabilities against assets with a value of roughly $19.6 billion before last week’s crash, and roughly $9.6 billion after the crash (as of Thursday, per FTX’s numbers). Of that $19.6 billion of assets back in the good times, some $14.4 billion was in more-or-less FTX-associated tokens (FTT, SRM, SOL, MAPS). Only about $5.2 billion of assets — against $8.9 billion of customer liabilities — was in more-or-less normal financial stuff. (And even that was mostly in illiquid venture investments; only about $1 billion was in liquid cash, stock and cryptocurrencies — and half of that was Robinhood stock.) After the run on FTX, the FTX-associated stuff, predictably, crashed. The Thursday balance sheet valued the FTT, SRM, SOL and MAPS holdings at a combined $4.3 billion, and that number is still way too high.
If you have one of your companies give another of your companies a loan collateralized by an asset at many times what that asset could actually be sold for, is that fraud?
You might enjoy Matt Levine's take in Everything Everywhere is Securities Fraud
You know the basic idea. A company does something bad, or something bad happens to it. Its stock price goes down, because of the bad thing. Shareholders sue: Doing the bad thing and not immediately telling shareholders about it, the shareholders say, is securities fraud. Even if the company does immediately tell shareholders about the bad thing, which is not particularly common, the shareholders might sue, claiming that the company failed to disclose the conditions and vulnerabilities that allowed the bad thing to happen.
And so contributing to global warming is securities fraud, and sexual harassment by executives is securities fraud, and customer data breaches are securities fraud, and mistreating killer whales is securities fraud, and whatever else you’ve got. Securities fraud is a universal regulatory regime; anything bad that is done by or happens to a public company is also securities fraud, and it is often easier to punish the bad thing as securities fraud than it is to regulate it directly.
...
But the principle of the thing is that U.S. securities law is a global universal regulatory regime: If a foreign company never issues shares in the U.S. and files its financial statements and other reports only abroad, it can still be sued in the U.S. for securities fraud. And in the U.S., everything is securities fraud.
He also has a take on the Bankman-Fried trial in today's issue.
In the FTX case I think the case for fraud is pretty simple.
-
As an exchange FTX was a custodian of customer assets. If a customer bought 10 BTC then FTX was obliged to hold that 10 BTC in case that customer wanted to sell it or transfer it or whatever.
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FTX did in fact represent to customers that it was a custodian of their assets and did have their assets.
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FTX did not actually have custody of the relevant assets. They sold them or lent them or sent them to Alameda or otherwise did not retain the assets they were obliged to.
I think the appointment effectively accomplishes Newsom's two goals of appointing someone who (1) will be a reliable Dem vote in the Senate and (2) has a low chance of winning re-election in 2024. I'm sure there are plenty of prominent California Democratic party politicians Newsom could appoint, but is concerned about how many of them could finagle that into re-election. His stated goal is to not decide the 2024 race with this appointment. I think appointing a relatively unknown outsider does this effectively.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
If Trump thought the assessors value was low the correct thing to do is hire an appraiser, get an actual value, and use that. As best the lawsuit seems to indicate Trump just made numbers up!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
It is not correct to say the judge is the one valuing Mar-a-Lago at 17-25 million. The judge is just quoting the valuation from the Palm Beach County Assessor:
From 2011-2021, the Palm Beach County Assessor appraised the market value of Mar-a-Lago at between $18 million and $27.6 million.
You can read the full ruling here. The ruling also goes over a bunch of properties Trump owned where he lied about easily verifiable facts to inflate valuations, like claiming his Trump Tower triplex was 30k sq ft when it was actually 11k sq ft.
Seriously, just skip down to page 20 and start reading. For property after property Trump was in possession of third party appraisals of his properties that he inflated to many times their actual value when reporting their worth to other parties.
Seven Springs:
Notwithstanding receiving market values from professional appraisals in 2000, 2006, 2012, and 2014 valuing Seven Springs at or below $ 30 million, Donald Trump's 2011 SFC reported the value to be $ 261 million, and his 2012, 2013 and 2014 SFCs reportedthe value to be $ 291 million.
So he inflated the value of his property by almost 10x what an appraiser said it was worth.
40 Wall Street:
In 2010, Cushman & Wakefield appraised the Trump Organization's interest in 40 Wall Street at $200 million. Cushman & Wakefield appraised again in 2011 and 2012, reaching valuations of between $200 and $220 million.
Despite these appraisals, the 2011 and 2012 SFCs valued the Trump Organization's interest in the property at $524.7 million and $527.2 million, respectively, an overvaluation of more than $300 million each year.
Please tell me how it isn't fraud to lie to banks you're seeking a loan from and claim your assets are worth many times what they are actually appraised for.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think it is important in this context to distinguish between "unlawful" in a criminal sense and "unlawful" in a civil sense. Functionally all criminal laws are written the way you describe. With a list of the prohibited conduct and a range of penalties for doing it. Civil law penalties are more vague because their purpose is to redress some harm that some individual A has caused some other individual B. Legislatures can (and do) pass laws modifying what kinds of damages one may receive when one has been wronged in various civil ways but there is not (by design) as complete a specification as criminal law. Civil law instead relies on the Plaintiff (the person bringing the suit) being able to articulate how much they have been wronged and asking a court for appropriate relief. To some extent we put trust in judges and courts (and a complex system of precedents) to figure out what the appropriate relief is in civil cases.
Lawsuits for violations of civil rights are, in the United States, civil lawsuits and generally are asking courts for (1) damages actually suffered and (2) an injunction against the defendant. The second part is important because it means if the enjoined defendant engages in the described conduct again there can be additional penalties (criminal and civil) for violating a court order, above whatever civil law violations it would also entail.
Circling back to your AA example the Supreme Court's ruling is more like "If You Discriminate On The Basis Of Race We'll Order You To Pay Damages To The People You've Discriminated Against And If This Isn't The First Time We'll Impose Additional And Escalating Penalties."
(As far as I know, the universities have not been penalized or ordered to compensate their victims in any way – if this is incorrect, I would be open to being corrected.)
If they haven't yet, they will be. I think a little civil procedure is instructive here. Before anyone in a civil suit gets ordered to pay anyone else damages you first need to figure out whether the defendant is liable. After a court has made a determination about the defendant's liability, that determination becomes appealable to some higher court (and eventually SCOTUS). On appeal the appellate court doesn't take over the whole case, they are usually only deciding the particular issue being appealed. Afterwards they'll send the case back down to the original court with an order to continue proceedings consistent with their opinion. So SCOTUS's decision was the "end" of the case in the sense it found Harvard and UNC liable and created a national precedent that their conduct was a violation of the student's constitutional rights but it was not the end in a procedural sense. The trial court still needs to actually issue an injunction and figure out how much in damages to award the plaintiffs.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I recommend Foldable Ideas video on NFTs. If you're familiar with (or don't care about) the history of crypto and tokens more generally you can probably skip to Section 4 (~39:00), though I recommend watching the whole thing.
On the buyer side, NFTs were an example of what finance calls greater fool theory. The basic idea is you can get people to pay irrational prices for something as long as they are convinced they will be able to sell that thing to someone else (the "greater fool") for a profit. People didn't buy NFTs because they (necessarily) believed in the value proposition of an NFT at some particular price point, but because it would be a profitable investment due to an appreciation in value. Wash trading, for example, is a way a particular seller might manufacture a history of an NFT increasing in value before selling it to someone else, who hopes to see a continued pattern of increase in value. The technical aspects of NFTs and blockchain function in a primarily obfuscatory capacity. To give people some tech jargon for why their investment will appreciate that they fundamentally do not understand. A demonstration that Eulering is alive and well.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Yes, I drink quite frequently myself. I intend them as a kind of illustrative example, not necessarily to be taken literally. They are the pointing finger, not the moon.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I don't agree. To more fully lay out a theory of when I think it's appropriate to say something like "A got B drunk" I think of A taking some action that overcomes B's own intentions about how drunk to get to cause B to become much more intoxicated than they intended. The scene in North by Northwest you link obviously involves overcoming someone's intentions by force but I think it can also be done by fraud. Sure, if your martini has an extra shot worth of Vermouth in it or whatever I wouldn't call that enough by itself. But I think spiking an otherwise non-alcoholic drink or mixing less alcoholic drinks (like beer) with more alcoholic ones (like whiskey) without the knowledge or consent of the subject can rise to a similar level.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Not sure I agree. I can imagine a scenario where it would be sensible to describe A as having gotten B drunk, or drugged them with alcohol. An obvious example would be A adding some more potent alcohol to B's drink without B's knowledge or consent.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I think the problem is you're envisioning "drugging" someone as requiring use of, like, rohypnol or other illicit drugs. I would be willing to bet that, in California, "getting someone so drunk they lose consciousness" counts as "drugging."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Predicting you'll be arrested is not generally admission of guilt to a crime. You can be wrong, after all! Also note how Epps caveats his comments with "peacefully" immediately after the "We need to go into the Capitol" part. 18 USC 2102(a) requires the riot in question involve violence or threats of violence. Calling for entering the Capitol peacefully would seem to be the opposite of that. I've never been a federal prosecutor but I wouldn't love bringing charges under 18 USC 2101 just on the basis of what's in the video. As @huadpe notes in a parallel comment the speech would also have to pass the test from Brandenburg v. Ohio (and apparently nobody has been charged with incitement). I am not sure speech the previous night for violence the following day is sufficiently "imminent" under Brandenburg.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
It is a very minor charge. Now granted, Epps did not enter the Capitol himself - but his open agitation of the attack nonetheless seems to me like it should constitute a significantly more serious offence, such as incitement to riot.
IANAL but it seems like 18 USC 2101 could be appropriate. Although 18 USC 2102(b) provides:
As used in this chapter, the term “to incite a riot”, or “to organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot”, includes, but is not limited to, urging or instigating other persons to riot, but shall not be deemed to mean the mere oral or written (1) advocacy of ideas or (2) expression of belief, not involving advocacy of any act or acts of violence or assertion of the rightness of, or the right to commit, any such act or acts.
So it probably depends pretty specifically on what Epps said and what the feds could convince a jury of. Was Epps urging or instigating others to commit or threaten violence? Or was he merely advocating an idea or expressing a belief that didn't necessarily entail violent acts?
Speaking of which, it's very odd that he did not go into the Capitol himself, given that he loudly and repeatedly urged others to.
The article notes there were a few others who went to the Capitol but didn't go inside. Do we have any information on what they were charged with? Might be a useful point of comparison.
Also the article you linked to references another NYT article from yesterday, when the charging was originally announced, and says:
Mr. Epps was also interviewed by the F.B.I. and was removed from the bureau’s list of suspects wanted in connection with the Capitol attack in the summer of 2021. “That should have been the end of the matter for Epps,” his lawyer wrote in the complaint against Fox.
I almost wonder if the FBI considered his conduct too minor to charge in summer 2021 and maybe lost track of his case in the interim since he wasn't on their list anymore? Then, Epps was back in the news with his interview and lawsuit so they decided they should get around to charging him? Given the harassment it sounds like he faced maybe he wanted to be charged to try and put rumors of his being a fed to bed? I might rather spend some time in jail or on probation than be inundated with conspiracy theory driven death threats!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
And this dichotomy is exactly what I'm criticizing. Masnick's entire shtick is to prevaricate between officially state-driven things that could be anywhere near the First Amendment whenever the censorship is something he opposes (see this) no matter how regulated speech is in that sphere otherwise, and then raising incredibly exacting standards for what counts as government action when it's something he doesn't care about (see for example this post conflating double-digit legal demands with the literally thousands of 'unofficial requests' from the government.).
I don't know how to tell you this but there's a difference between a government passing a law imposing criminal or civil penalties on someone and them clicking the equivalent of a Super Report button. The article specifically notes that Twitter did not comply with a majority of the government's unofficial requests. Twitter was (and is) free to ignore unofficial requests from the government. The doctors in the first article would not be free to disregard the government's prohibition on discussing certain topics with patients. The two things are different in very important ways.
Which is funny, because you'd think that people would be at least somewhat opposed to slurs that touched on them, and instead Twitter and Advertisers supposedly found tweeting "Learn To Code" at a handful of bargain-basement 'journalists' worse than having ads sandwiched between "KillAllMen" and photoshopped decapitations of a certain politician. And it was always like that.
Have you been on Twitter? Why would I think that? I'm sorry that advertisers and Twitter users don't share your ratings of what things are bad but their opinions are the ones that matter for Twitter's continued viability as a business.
Indeed, and he quickly papered over any potential problem by giving his friends at Twitter the most charitable possible explanations and possible facts, and then when those assumptions came false retreated time and time again, often in hilariously misleading ways. That link rests heavily on people not finding yet that any evidence of government pressure, and then despite all of the later releases his information since his comments never quite get around to revisiting the matter except to provide increasingly circumscribed reasons This Does Count.
I mean, yea. It's important that if you're going to allege the government pressured Twitter about the laptop story and that was the cause of their suppression people are going to want, like, evidence. So far none has been forthcoming. The best I've seen is some general warnings to Twitter about possible disinformation regarding Joe/Hunter from Russia.
((I don't think Musk will actually bring this case, or be successful if he does, and it's certainly not a multi-billion and maybe not even multi-million dollar tort. But that's more because it'd be worth pennies on the legal fee dollar even in the off chance he wins, and the standards for when a claim is an opinion of undisclosed facts or where it's just an opinion mumblemumble are an absolute mess. In addition to the obvious reputational risks.))
I think the ADL's problem with Musk becomes much more obvious phrased as "He made frivolous threats they had committed torts against him."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Citation that their ads will be equally effective? That there would be no difference in user base under various moderation schemes?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
When Masnick is discussing Twitter protecting people's first amendment rights he doesn't mean they didn't ban people (because banning people doesn't implicate their first amendment rights) he means they resisted subpoenas from the government demanding they de-anonymize it's critics, which does implicate their first amendment rights.
The criticism of pre-Musk Twitter was never that it banned CSAM or followed copyright law, Masnick knows that, you know that, I know that, the dog knows that.
Yes, the point of the article is that very few of the people who talk about being a "free speech platform" have any idea that there's tons of stuff they are going to be legally obliged to moderate. The piece is not about responding to criticisms of Twitter, it's about the specific convergent evolution of social media moderation policies as the first paragraph makes clear:
It’s kind of a rite of passage for any new social media network. They show up, insist that they’re the “platform for free speech” without quite understanding what that actually means, and then they quickly discover a whole bunch of fairly fundamental ideas, institute a bunch of rapid (often sloppy) changes… and in the end, they basically all end up in the same general vicinity, with just a few small differences on the margin. Look, I went through it myself. In the early days I insisted that sites shouldn’t do any moderation at all, including my own. But I learned. As did Parler, Gettr, Truth Social and lots of others.
The actual criticisms are either glossed over ("level three" is hilariously short) or not engaged with at all (the godsdamned FBI called them and told them repeatedly not to run stories about Hunter Biden's laptop, while knowing that Hunter Biden's laptop had been out there, and I notice Masnick seems to have missed any mention about it).
What further elaboration is required? It turns out people don't like to spend time on a site where they are regularly called slurs! Advertisers think it damages their brand when their advertisements appear next to hate speech. Is this concept complicated? Masnick, in fact, has a whole article about Twitter and Hunter Biden's laptop.
Quite a lot of those "legal, financial, and social pressures" are just shared ideological capture, or only taken seriously because of shared ideological capture. There could be a plausible argument otherwise if pre-Musk Twitter's censorship focused on commonly-agreed slurs or clear falsity or other bad behaviors, but in practice for all that Twitter moderation had also always been arbitrary and inconsistent, it overwhelmingly ended up in a left-wing mode, encouraged and legitimized by a fairly small number of (overwhelmingly left-wing) partners that promoted these standards to both Twitter and its advertisers (and sometimes regulators!).
I don't even know how to respond to the implication that legal or financial pressures are due to shared ideological capture. If your primary revenue stream is from people advertising on your platform then it's important for the survival of your business in a non-ideological way that they continue to do that. You are somewhat at the whim of what advertisers like and want. Similar advertisers only want to advertise on your platform because they believe they can reach users who will buy things. If users abandon your platform en masse that is also bad for your business, so you are somewhat beholden to the desires of users, whatever your ideology. Legal pressure even more so! I guess X could stop reporting CSAM or responding to DMCA takedowns, but the end result would definitely be the end of their business! How is ideological capture related at all? Sure some social pressure and its response may be due to shared ideological capture, I acknowledge as much in another comment.
The ADL is Musk's current focus, simply because (he alleges) that they've directly contacted his advertising partners before he even took ownership and a lot of what he's described (if true!) is very close to playing bingo with tortuous interference with contract.
What is the tort the ADL committed to constitute the "tortious" part of tortious interference? I am pretty sure they're his foe now because he goes around promoting open anti-semites like Keith Woods.
Depends on what you mean by "giving up" I guess. It took 15 rounds to elect McCarthy back in Jan. Probably depends on whether Jordan thinks he can convince the holdouts to vote for him. Personally I'm not sure what he could offer them. I did hear rumors that two Republicans had floated doing some kind of unity Seakership and voting for Jeffries, but they would need three more to join them to have the votes.
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