because he wouldn’t have fucked up COVID so spectacularly and likely would have won a second term.

I think that, frankly, COVID would have fucked up any president. I mean, we had some damning rhetoric and piss poor moves, but on the other hand there weren’t good moves really to be had. The best response would have still been an economic catastrophe that would not have recovered. We might have had fewer deaths, but we’d still have a lot of them. I think if it had been COVID-11 then even Obama would have lost his second term.

do some really sketchy stuff. Simply put “war”

Note that as bad as that is and as evil as it has sometimes been, it is “legal”, and thus not subject to criminal prosecution. It is specifically legal for the president to do that sketchy stuff.

For an “official” act to be illegal, but not subject to prosecution just makes no sense. It shouldn’t be possible for an illegal act to be “official”.

Extra bonkers is the 5/4 opinion that you can’t even mention official acts, like if you accept a bribe in exchange for an appointment, you can’t mention the appointment while trying to prosecute the bribe.

Perhaps an oversimplification, but I’d say it’s the one point that progressives are so pissed that they would tend to forget that the other likely choice would rather see more genocide. On other points I’d say progressives may wish for better, but are willing to be more pragmatic for now.

This is my thought. I could imagine Biden announcing that Obama was coming in to play a very key role in his administration and that might give him a boost. That while technically the buck stops with Biden still, that Obama is very close to contribute.

This would sidestep the “annointed one” problem, avoid skipping the primary, and while it’s short of a new candidate, it gets a very popular person near the presidency who couldn’t have been the candidate.

I couldn’t imagine them starting from scratch at this point, couldn’t imagine who they would pick that people would already resonate with.

Given the timing that nearly all the primaries are done, his replacement would necessarily be someone no one even has the chance to vote on. This is a tremendous risk.

However, if he announced someone like “announcing my new chief of staff: Obama”…

I suppose that would make sense. Trump doubled down on tax cuts for the wealthy and burning the hell out of fossil fuels. So even if someone were oblivious to his lying, and Trump was able to “perform” more confidently, the end result were policies with grave implications. Also, on the one weak point with progressives, falling to protect Palestinians, Trump’s criticism was that Biden wasn’t pro Israel hard enough…

I was thinking the debate rules actually saved Trump from his worst impulses. Biden was allowed to speak at full length and Trump gets to appear like he can participate in a civilized conversation while Biden would sometimes go off the rails while trying to fill his time. A lot of his embarrassments started in a decent place, but pivoted badly in the middle.

Trump confidently lied repeatedly without consequences, and so long as someone is unaware that it’s lies, I could imagine them finding Trump’s rhetoric credible that night.

I’ll agree, but he was at the same time more bold, like saying everyone wanted to overturn Roe v Wade. Confident and competent lying can get you far, but if you lie about how the people watching would feel, you undermine all your other lying.

There are few things more maddening than claiming you know how someone feels more than they themselves do. A very credible liar can be undone if they lie that well on a matter the audience personally knows better. Suddenly all the benefit of the doubt purchased by the confidence is erased.

Note I didn’t claim the were progressive or that Biden did nothing, I’m saying voter sentiment is basically “not trump” rather than “for Biden”. I’ll accept that Kerry was in a similar position of being the “not W” candidate, but other than that I can’t think of a candidate whose popular support was so much more about “the other guy” than the candidate themselves.

I think as candidates Clinton, W. Bush, Gore, Obama, McCain had sincere support overshadowing the need to stop some particular bad person instead. As misguided as I think it is, Trump voters also are all about Trump less than stopping Biden. I can’t personally remember a race where “the other side must be stopped” as pretty much the sole consideration among the voters until the Trump era.

Yes, third party candidates are dismissed in a self fulfilling prophecy, but also that reality drives most reasonable would-be third party candidates to one of the viable parties, generally leaving third party candidates that wouldn’t be that popular anyway.

It’s one of those things that depends on the situation. As it stands, they want “no compulsory education”, but it’s because they don’t like what the students will learn. However, if they could be assured that the compulsory education would be consistent with their views, then they would be all about compulsory education. No need to fear the Bible, there’s plenty of “help” interpreting it available to people reading it…

Same on abortion rights. Currently the rhetoric is “well, it should be up to the states, not the federal government” but if they can ban it nationally, suddenly they would not be in favor of states like New York or California deciding for themselves.

human fucking rights

Literally…

He lost during a crazy pandemic that caused massive uncertainty, at a time when most of the economy was ‘shut down’. And even then, there were enough electoral votes to give him the victory that were less than a 1% margin of going to Trump. So he was shockingly close to winning, given the circumstances. Voting was also easier than ever in 2020, and many of those measures to make voting easier have been undone. So in 2020, you probably didn’t need to go to a job, and even if you did, you could easily mail your vote in. In 2024, a likely Biden voter is more likely to have their job tie them up and are also less likely to reasonably be able to mail in a vote.

More than half of Americans think the economy is in bad shape (whether or not they are accurate is beside the point). That’s generally a bad sign for an incumbent. Trump’s tossing out populist fodder as promises he would certainly break, but there’s a large population willing to bet on that longshot.

He won’t be elected. Ever.

Unfortunately, I think you are gravely underestimating his chances.

I’d be happier if he ran off to a non extradition country. They can still elect him from prison, he wouldn’t be a martyr. I don’t care as long as he is out of my hair.

Clinton had downloadable content?

In my state, you can be independent and vote for either.

But yeah, I voted in the Republican primary this time, to vote against Trump, even though I would have wanted Nikki to lose, but would rather risk that than Trump.

Yep, and I see evidence of that over complication in some ‘getting started’ questions where people are asking about really convoluted design points and then people reinforcing that by doubling down or sometimes mentioning other weird exotic stuff, when they might be served by a checkbox in a ‘dumbed down’ self-hosting distribution on a single server, or maybe installing a package and just having it run, or maybe having to run a podman or docker command for some. But if they are struggling with complicated networking and scaling across a set of systems, then they are going way beyond what makes sense for a self host scenario.

Based on what I’ve seen, I’d also say a homelab is often needlessly complex compared to what I’d consider a sane approach to self hosting. You’ll throw all sorts of complexity to imitate the complexity of things you are asked to do professionally, that are either actually bad, but have hype/marketing, or may bring value, but only at scales beyond a household’s hosting needs and far simpler setups will suffice that are nearly 0 touch day to day.

To run as a Democrat in ND is to automatically lose. The portion of the electorate that will refuse to look beyond the team sports identity is so huge, if you actually want to participate, you have to technically be a member of the correct “team”.