Misogyny is not called “The world’s oldest form of prejudice” for nothing. They should definitely look at somebody other than Harris, especially if her polling data is weak. No sense is ditching Biden for Harris if she’s statistically less likely to get people to turn out for her.

While I do think he’s an effective bureaucrat and statesman, Newsom is genuinely reviled by California Republicans. Republicans not liking their Democrat governor is obviously nothing new, but there was nowhere near even 1% of the same vitriol being directed towards Jerry Brown, his predecessor and also a Democrat.

I kind of feel like Newsom doesn’t really have the chops for the national stage yet. He doesn’t have any accolades to his name, was mired in a scandal during Covid, and California is not doing so hot on the issues that the Dem establishment are trying hard to tackle. Chiefly among those issues is rampant homelessness and drug addiction, which the state has funneled billions into trying to solve and so far gotten nowhere fast. The attack ads almost write themselves.

To be clear, I do find him appealing (at least more than Biden), but I think he’s going to have an uphill battle at unifying the disparate Democratic party if he’s given 4-ish months to mount a campaign.

I remain unconvinced.

You asked for an explanation and I gave you one. Keep on dreaming that the only thing keeping Democratic establishment where they are on the political spectrum is that magic 5% number you tossed out and not the oodles of cash that their corporate donors supply them to keep things as they are.

Andrew Yang sent out an email the other day that I partially agree with. The JD Vance pick is a bold signal that Trump thinks he’s already won. He could have picked Doug Bergum, Glenn Youngkin, Nikki Haley, or Marco Rubio and any of them would have brought something to the table that could potentially shore up Trump’s weaknesses in the upcoming election and reassured moderates, corporate donors, and minority groups that Trump had their best interests at heart. But instead he picked a junior senator with no legislative accomplishments, no real connections to business or Washington politicians, and no household name recognition, and only redeeming quality is that he has a law degree from Yale.

I would say it’s almost certain that he got picked because he made a statement that if he were the VP during Trump’s first term, he would not have certified the 2020 election results. Yikes.

I’m not surprised that Trump is packing his cabinet with dyed-in-the-wool loyalists. Part of the reason a lot of his plots failed in his first term is because career politicians refused to break the law at his behest. I don’t really see this backfiring for him since the VP pick is secondary to Trump’s own cult of personality. It’s not a strong VP pick, but it didn’t really matter who he picked. He could have picked Donald Trump Jr. to be his running mate and MAGA would have gone along with it.

You’re getting downvoted because thinking that Green getting 5% of the vote will cause Democrats to pull left is a laughable fantasy. Nothing that any 3rd parties do affect their decisions or their overall platform. It’s all about money. You have a better chance of affecting Democratic or Republican policy if you donate a million dollars to one of their fundraisers than you do voting for Green, Libertarian, Independent, or whatever else for the rest of your entire life.

Without ranked or approval-based voting reform, nothing will ever split up the political duopoly in this country. We should be focusing our efforts on that, starting with local elections and working our way up. Down ballot races are arguably more impactful to your day-to-day life than which ass ends up in the Oval Office chair.

I get that voting while living in a state that is guaranteed to break for Trump or Biden feels like an exercise in futility. I’m not here to convince you to change your vote to Dem or Rep, you should feel entitled to do what you want with your vote, but stop pretending like throwing away your vote on the 3rd party candidate with no chance of winning and patting yourself on the back is some noble endeavor.

I really liked the second-hand blackberry I had in the mid 00’s. I hope that design with physical buttons and the trackball makes a comeback someday. Though I think people are too accustomed to touch screens to be able to move back to smaller devices at this point.

Yeah the conspiracies in this thread are cringe. Is it really such a stretch to think that a very hated individual was the target of a botched assassination? No, can’t be! Must be a false flag!

Everyone needs to calm the fuck down. This was quite clearly real and not staged.

Antifa shooting a fascist is very on brand.

The time traveler sent back to alter our timeline wasn’t a very good shot.

Or they could just use non-firing guns.

Or the armorer could actually do their job and not hand a loaded gun to the actor and call it a cold gun.

Absolutely. Housing crisis in full swing here and yet 55+ communities are somehow still legal. Infuriating that it works to the benefit of the old fucks by earmarking plenty of available units for only them, but when the young people want to get rid of it so they can have a shot at property ownership too, suddenly you’re an ageist.

I dunno…I kinda want to cook a young goat in it’s mother’s milk now. I bet it tastes great.

There is a procedure for this. To simplify the answer, Kamala Harris will become President on inauguration day in any of your listed scenarios, since she’s the current VP/VP-elect.

It’s theoretically possible that if Biden drops dead today, that the DNC could manage to pivot to a new contender, but there are two significant problems with that:

1. It’s suuuper late in the process. They already called the primaries for Biden, so he has the delegates. If he dies, they go to his VP, so it would be up to Harris to give them to someone else at that point if anybody else were to be selected (essentially dropping out of the race herself). This is a bad move because giving delegates to someone who didn’t even primary will seem undemocratic, coronating somebody that the people did not even endorse for the ticket.

2. Replacing Biden with someone else doesn’t give them much time to campaign. A big part of the election cycle is traveling to swing states to convince those people to vote for you. It’s not that those people are suddenly going to go vote for the other guy (Trump, in this case), but they’re far more likely to stay home because they won’t be energized for this newcomer who didn’t have enough time to court their votes, or to convince them to turn out for their policies/platform rather than be apathetic about the outcome of the election.

I’d like to make a counterpoint here, but first I want to acknowledge that you are 100% entitled to your opinion and maybe souls-like games are just not for you. It’s a shame that people are kicking downvotes your way because this is in no way a new or controversial opinion, but like you said, the community can sometimes take their love of the game/series too far and blame the consumer for not liking the same stuff they like, which isn’t fair and just makes the souls community looks like clowns.

Anyway, my counterpoint is that I don’t feel like these games are as difficult as people make them out to be. IMO, older games were just as hard, if not harder to complete even when playing optimally. In the framework of just about every Souls-like game, you have tools that you can use to almost completely trivialize the toughest encounters if you want. DS1 can be beaten by a complete amateur if you do the gravelord speedrun (which doesn’t require any real speedrunning tricks and there are many youtube tutorials that you can follow along with, takes about 10-15 minutes from character creation) and get the gravelord greatsword which can inflict Toxic on all the bosses, so you can just hit them a few times and run away for the rest of the fight, waiting for the poison to finish them off. That’s just one example. Just about every installment of FromSoftware’s Souls’ series has some overpowered cheese that you can research to essentially trivialize the game. Some people might argue that you’re not beating the game in the “intended way” if you take such shortcuts, but I disagree. Any way you make it to the end is the right way.

For a lot of people, part of the fun of a game like Dark Souls is the adventure, the discovery, and yes, pounding your head against a tough boss trying to beat it over and over. If you’re the type of gamer who gets easily frustrated to the point where you feel like quitting when encountering a challenge that feels unfun or unfair, I can see it not being an enjoyable experience. The thing that keeps most people coming back is the dopamine hit that they get when they do finally overcome that challenge and they are rewarded with more stuff to explore, new items to pick up, and so on. I think if there were any argument to be made against making the game easier for yourself by exploiting broken game mechanics (or with an easy/story mode added or modded in), it’s that you probably won’t be super invested in the outcome and get bored easily. Without the challenge aspect, the Souls games are very much a bare bones experience. It’s essentially a generic fantasy RPG with a story hidden behind item descriptions and cryptic NPC interactions. That doesn’t exactly make for the most compelling gameplay, so there’s no trail of breadcrumbs to keep the gamer uninterested in the challenge going. There’s a sort of intrinsic value in these games that can’t be quantified, because everybody gets something different out of it.

I think this is unironically how they need to spin it. Convince the Republican base that this ruling is actually better for Biden than it is for Trump by repeating their own false narratives back to them - that the Biden Crime Family will get away with everything. Albeit, the things he could actually get away with are limited to what the court determines is an official act, and given the current makeup of the SCOTUS it’s unlikely that they would side with him even if there were precedent, but he would be still almost untouchable under this new ruling no matter how you spin it.

Have a case against Joe Biden? Sorry, all of that evidence is now inadmissible in a court of law because it happened while he was president. Too bad, Republicans! Maybe if you were to… I dunno, pass a constitutional amendment that revoked that privilege. But oooooh nooooo, that would be horrible! Please, anything but that! All our nefarious plots would be undone and Biden would go to prison!

I am aware of the situation, and its the same things that democrats would do in the same situation.

That which is asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. No proof that democrats would do the same in that situation and we have 200 years of peaceful transfers of power to prove that.

You assume that I am a trump vote, but I am not.

Nobody simps this hard for Trump if they aren’t also planning on voting for him too. It’s okay, I already think you’re an idiot, I can’t possibly have a lower opinion of you right now. You might as well just say the quiet parts out loud. I’m certainly not trying to convince you to change your vote at this point. I already know whose “team” you are on anyway, since you seem to think this is just a game.

I just know that your team sucks more than his team and does worse things, like try to throw the most likely presidential candidate in prison.

The RNC had two whole years to pick another candidate. Two years knowing that Trump was under felony indictment and could very likely be imprisoned right around the election. This was not an accident - they are using the fact that Trump is being tried in court as a political weapon. The Republicans think you are stupid and will try to convince you that this is a plot by the democrats when in reality, Trump did this to himself by committing the crimes he did. If Trump doesn’t want to go to jail, maybe he should have thought about the consequences.

…by submitting a fake slate of electors. I feel like this is not that complex of a concept to grasp, but I’ll simplify it for your FOX News-addled mush brain:

Imagine a scenario in which 10 people eating at a restaurant all want to decide what to have for dessert. After some discussion, they’ve narrowed the choices down to Key Lime Pie or Cheesecake. The kitchen will only make one dessert for the table, so the table has to pick one or the other, they can’t have both. Naturally, the table takes a vote to see which dessert a majority of people will be satisfied with. 6 people vote for Key Lime Pie, and 4 people vote for Cheesecake. Key Lime Pie wins. So the table sends one of their group to go and take the order to the kitchen, making it official. But along the way, one of the Cheesecake guys decides that they don’t give a shit if most of the people at the table wanted something different and they intercept the guy delivering the order. They tell that person that a few people at the table changed their minds and now Cheesecake actually won so they should tell the chef to make that instead. Of course, the people at the table did not change their minds, this was a lie meant to trick the person delivering the order into doing what they wanted rather than what the majority demanded.

Given that scenario, don’t you think it’s unfair that the people who voted for Key Lime Pie would have been deprived of the dessert that they actually wanted and most people agreed on had the person who submitted the fake order actually succeeded?

Same thing here. Trump was the government, so there was nothing to overthrow. He overturned the election to remain in power past his mandate. Hence why I’m wondering why you’re talking about needing fighter jets to overthrow a government because that’s not what we’re talking about, nor is violent revolution always a prerequisite for a coup d’état.

Who said anything about overthrowing the government?

His failed plot to overturn the legitimate election by submitting a fake slate of electors? Yes, we remember.