That's because he only cares about when the election happens. He has plans in place to deny the results and to send his chud army out to terrorize. That's all he is waiting for.
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Yeah… this feels right. He seems to have checked out because the real campaign starts once he has lost. They’d rather use their dollars shielding him from further judicial consequence and preparing to set the country on fire once he loses.
What worries me is we'll have a repeat of 2016 where everyone just assumed Hillary was going to win so they didn't vote. Hopefully people will go out and vote regardless.
Absolutely. When I saw the headline I thought the same thing. Bad actors will try to sew exactly that thought in liberal circles as long as Dems have the momentum.
We can't buy into it and need to resolve ourselves to fight like hell until election day, regardless of what "the polls" or "the experts" say. We need to make Kamala win in an indisputable landslide. We need to send a message that will make Trump and his acolytes political pariahs from now on.
I wish every election could be this easy
Remember to still vote, there was a time when too many people just didn't because it was assured Hillary would win.
Roe V. Wade was appealed and many women are dead now as a result
I know that the Republican party made this happen, but Democrats are absolutely complicit in letting it happen.
Obama promised to codify Roe v Wade when he had a super majority, and he just didn't. Why didn't he?
Ruth Bader Ginsberg could have retired and let us set a better judge into the Supreme Court, and yet the Dems somehow couldn't look one presidential term into the future and try to have a contingency plan. Why?
Obama never had a supermajority. He got close but peaked at 59 senators in the senate and one in hospital. One shy of 60 is not enough.
2016 was also "easy"
Ever play an arcade video game from the 1980s? I'm talking about the ones in the arcades where you had to pop a quarter into the machine to play.
Here's the thing about those games. The first 2 levels or so were usually pretty easy. Weak AI opponents. Easily distinguishable patterns. But then you hit level 3 or 4. And the difficultly skyrockets. With absolutely no warning. You go from "Hey, this game ain't so bad" to regretting all of your life choices. And if you don't know what you're doing, you're going to get owned, hard. Only a few people could get past a couple of levels, and only the best of the best were skilled enough to be able to play as long as they wanted until they clocked the game.
That's where we're at now. Trump played those first couple of levels. Clinton was a divisive figure in her own right and treated the 2016 race like she could skate to victory too. Biden had weaknesses that Trump could easily exploit. The real game has begun and Trump has absolutely no idea how to actually play. So Trump wants to start the game over. He doesn't want to make it to level 3 because he knows he'll never beat level 3. He's looking for a reset switch like on the Atari 2600 so he could keep playing the first two levels over and over and over. Because he knows how to beat those.
But he can't. So he's essentially stopped playing the game. He's telling everybody in the arcade how rigged that machine is, the joystick's broken, and you need to hit the fire button 10, 12, 15 times for it to fire. And he's getting jealous that all the cool kids in the mall aren't listening to him, and are circling around the new girl who popped her quarter in and has gotten to levels Trump hasn't even seen before, while he goes to the corner of the arcade, pops a quarter into the dusty, old Pong machine, and wonders why nobody fucking cares.
Only semi-related:
Hunter S. Thompson took great pains to speak in sports metaphors, because that's the language of "middle America."
I've thought that, for a while now, video games have become the language of "middle America" and whoever can speak to the gamers in their language will capture their minds.
Steve Bannon also understood this, and that's why he succeeded in capturing many young men's minds through Gamergate.
We need people better than Steve Bannon speaking this language and leaving gamers with positive, healthy understanding of the world around them.
Anyway, I write this because I think your video game metaphor really works here, and I think that's the way to speak to a large portion of our populace now.
Make the guy who makes tier zoo on YouTube teach all democrats.
Seriously, the devs took a big risk with the 2016 patch, they just didn’t like what the players did to that gorilla.
Anyway, I write this because I think your video game metaphor really works here, and I think that’s the way to speak to a large portion of our populace now.
I don't know that arcade metaphors really work for most of the population now, though. Even when I was young they were dying.
It wasn't like a switch got flipped, no one would keep playing.
They'd make a tiny segment super hard so you'd have to drop a couple bucks to get past it. Go back to easy for a little. Then hit another hard part.
It's basically the whole reason for boss fights.
Once games started developing storylines, plots, etc. it was like that. It was an intentional strategy developed to keep you playing. But early developers weren't thinking that far ahead. The idea was to give you a couple of easy levels so you feel you got your 5 minutes worth of entertainment worth, then start punishing you at level 3 or 4 so you'd lose and the next person would play.
And some were made by simple oversight. Space invaders' increasing difficulty was solely the result of hardware limitations of the time that just happened to result in the exact difficulty spikes they were looking for. As a programmer, I could, for example, set level 1 vs. an opponent that was slow as festering dog shit, but be lazy and just double his speed with every level. As long as the player's speed stays the same, it would become nearly impossible to win in a couple of levels.
Either way, the results were the same: 25 cents for about 5 minutes worth of entertainment. That was the goal of the day. As you mentioned, they fine tuned it by the mid 80s with games like Mario and the like. but those early games were meant to get you off the cabinet as quickly as possible so soneone else could pop in their quarter.
set level 1 vs. an opponent that was slow as festering dog shit, but be lazy and just double his speed with every level. As long as the player’s speed stays the same, it would become nearly impossible to win in a couple of levels.
Exactly, and long term people would stop playing because they always get stuck about the same time.
It's like how humans respond to rewards, a steady consistent reward is kind of motivating, it's why we go to work in the morning
But what works a shit ton better is sporadic rewards that have a tiny tiny chance of paying off.
That's why people get addicted to slot machines and not working at McDonald's. If a slot machine paid out 75 cents for every dollar everytime, no one would play.
Have them win $7.50 every tenth time they put a dollar in tho, and people will flush their entire lives away chasing that 1/10 of a time they "win".
So if you really want to exploit gamers, you can't steadily increase difficulty. Linearly or exponentially, it doesn't matter. To hook people they need those "wins" and they'll keep dropping quarters or spinning loot boxes.
In coin operated video games, that's when things get easy
A better example with Space Invaders is once they beat a level, they get to the next one and it's slow again due to the amount of enemies on the screen. Letting the player get that easy time again hooks them. If the next level they were all as fast as the last one from last level, it wouldn't have been as addictive
This is an interesting article - thanks for sharing! I found this snippet noteworthy:
According to one former aide who served in the White House under the former president, Trump has lost the plot.
“The stakes for Trump this election are arguably the highest they’ve ever been. His criminal cases don’t go away if he loses. Yet he seems to be phoning it in, running a remarkably low-energy, undisciplined campaign,” explained Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump spokesperson. “From spending days off the campaign trail golfing to coming up with frankly weak nicknames like ‘Kamabala,’ it feels like he’s lost his mojo.”
That is a good point about the criminal cases not going away if he loses, right? It's interesting how it's openly stated by the former aide.
I'm unable to muster any sympathy for the felon's perpetual state of stewing.
He must think that "his" SC will protect him regardless, so he has an out if he loses. Or, he knows about the plan to ratfuck the election regardless of the outcome.
A. Win it. (Looking increasingly unlikely)
B. Steal it. Most of the fake electors are still in place, they've had four years to hire a new sleepers
C. Coup 2.0 historically the Democrats haven't been very smart about things and it'll totally blindside when you pull it again only this time with more people. All those people that got locked up in serious consequences we'll just tell them that we'll pardon them again
D. Civil War 2.0. if he doesn't win it, and can't steal it, and if there's actually military protection around the Capital for 2.0. he'll just openly call for the south to rise again. Only this time it's not the south, it's the rural areas, hell plan a Vietnam style offensive where the rural armed people lay siege everywhere.
My real actual best guess is he's tired. He's old, he's out of shape, he's stressed to the nines and he's just trying to blow off the stress, he probably does have a plan b in a plan c. His actual plan d is probably two take a flight to Russia.
Even the recent movie "Civil War" didn't touch on how and why such a thing started, because it just doesn't make sense. There may be regional conflicts and riots, I don't doubt that, but there's no single organization to pull off a new Confederacy or whatever it would be. People watching the film even laughed at the union of Texas and California...what? Maybe that was a subtle message by the writers to not take the overall thing seriously, the movie wasn't about the background events but about the characters in a hypothetical situation.
If he loses, I'm very curious to see if people in power still support him. I don't think he will be very viable again in 4 years, physically or mentally.
He may become more useful if they let him get eaten by the legal machine. Then they're able to invoke his image like they do with Reagan all the time, but with some martyrdom thrown in about how those mean libs kicked a former president when he was down, nevermind he got away with the crimes he'd be charged with for about a decade by then.
He might not ever serve time, but having everyone ignore him as useless as he sunsets might be an almost fitting punishment. We know the right struggles with empathy, so he could be facing some very frosty cold shoulders.
The best thing that could have happened for Republicans was trump got assassinated and Biden refused to step down.
Now they're stuck with trump and Dems cut all their baggage by dropping their elderly infirm candidate.
trumps only real shot is stepping down to. Letting someone else run, and counting on them to pardon everything possible and the SC to take care of the rest.
That has a chance at least, but he can't beat Kamala.
I'm glad he put in as much effort into this as he did to stopping Covid. I think I'd have preferred Biden to Kamala, but Joe just stopped bringing it, so I was getting nervous. Without years of Sleepy Joe and Brandon memes, Trump just can't figure it out lately, and barely seems to be trying.
I'm in Pennsylvania, so I'm going to be voting the hell out of this election, and hopefully we'll reach Jan 7 without drama. Then we can start getting on Kamala for her less than great positions, but until then, we got bigger things to deal with and I'm not going to crap much on the better of the 2 options. Post election is another story.
Without years of Sleepy Joe and Brandon memes,
Fuck man....
Are neoliberals doing that thing again where they insist their candidate is perfect and if anyone tries to point out that there are valid flaws with neoliberal politicians it's because they fell for Republican misinformation?
Anyone that was or is going to vote D doesn't care what Republicans say.
Dem voters didn't want Biden to run against trump, Republicans did
That should tell you all you need to know about how good of a candidate Biden was.
I don't believe any of it swayed any votes, but I do believe it got a significant amount of people that either wouldn't vote or wouldn't promote a candidate to do so. From a hype and marketing viewpoint, I don't think one could argue MAGA has not been a tremendous success for Republicans. I don't recall a candidate of either party owning the media or having so much merch-aganda as Trump, and it's going to hurt them when he's gone. No one's going to be sporting I'm going HAM for Lindsey Graham stuff.
I said in my original comment I'm all for getting in any candidate not doing the best thing. There were things I didn't like about Biden, and there are a number of things about Kamala I'm not excited about, but that is hopefully next January's problem.
The concept of Biden as a candidate was viable, but the man himself no longer was. The Republican average Joe that was the real mass behind the MAGA movement no longer knows what to do though now that the Lock Her Up, Sleepy Joe's Got To Go, etc is gone. It's not just Trump with the wind knocked out of his sails, but a lot of supporters as well. Trump spoke their language, but now he's at a loss for words, and I'm happy to see it.
EDIT: Not me that downvoted you. I don't downvote for disagreeing, just for misinformation or bigoted crap and you haven't done anything like that.
but I do believe it got a significant amount of people that either wouldn’t vote or wouldn’t promote a candidate to do so.
No, Biden flaws made people not want to vote for him or promote him
Harris doesn't have that baggage, so as soon as she took over people were willing to do those things for the Dem candidate.
They say the same shit about Kamala as Joe.
It's just when they said stuff about Joe, some of it was true and what anyone could tell from his incredibly limited public appearances.
He did the lowest amount of press conferences as any president since Reagan...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/us/politics/biden-public-appearances-media.html
Do you really need me to tell you what common trait president Reagan and President Biden share?
The Rs fired up for Trump and the Ds bummed at Biden are 2 separate groups. Whoever minimizes the damages from their own respective group is going to come out on top. I don't see undecideds as a factor with as divergent as both parties are. They both had sagging bases, but the Kamala swap got one group fired up, but the other side just seems caught unprepared, and that's why polling is flipping.
Whoever doesn't think Kamala has baggage isn't paying attention. There's reasons she was hardly anyone's choice last time around, and anyone reading any articles other than the kiss up ones now is already getting a reminder of those reasons. Lemmy was full of articles about dropping the anti-death penalty stance from the platform this week, for example. But there isn't any good to come out of beating up on her about that unless she's elected first.
Don't think of them as undecided.
Think of them as people unwilling to hold their nose for Biden or trump.
Change out Biden, and suddenly more people are willing to vote.
Because Biden was and is a bad candidate. He spent like 50 years trying to be president and only succeeded in a rigged primary against the literal worst president we've ever had when he was the incumbent.
I don't think trump and Biden are the complete bottom of the barrel numbers for an incumbent at the end of their first term, but I'd be surprised if they weren't bottom 5, there might be a handful of ancient (for America) history that were less popular but not in modern history
Turnout seems to be slightly improving, but it's still around 60%. I get not being thrilled about either candidate, but you're not picking a best friend, you're pretty much picking a CEO for the country.
It's kinda weird to get thrilled by any candidate. I like a lot of things taxes pay for, but I didn't get excited for the act of paying taxes. Voting is just another civic duty we should all be doing.
Republicans get candidate they're excited for. Dems get candidates we can hold our noses for (hopefully)
It's a bigger reason why we still have republican presidents than the electoral college.
https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_elections
I'm not sure where your picture came from. Or why it's combining 2 elections a line or why it's numbers are wrong.
But 60% for presidential years is pretty normal.
08 got a bump from Obama running, and 2020 got a bump because trump was the incumbent. 2024 will likly be above 2020 still. But that's because compared to trump or Biden, Kamala is an amazing candidate. If we had known it would be Kamala, I think she wouldn't get the numbers she's about to
The best thing that could happen for Republicans and Trump is that they manage to fuck with the election enough that it doesn't matter who wins the vote, either the Senate or the Supreme Court awards the election to Trump.
Senate
I mean, if Mike Pence wouldn't do it, I don't know if Chuck Schumer will....
Supreme Court
It's really not that easy for them. It worked on Gore because party leadership was telling Gore to concede, if he won he'd have put progressives in charge of the DNC.
But even if the SC tries to hand it to trump, it doesn't mean much. They can say it till they're blue in the face, it only matters if the Dem candidate goes along with it and concedes. The DNC won't push Kamala to "do the right thing to unite the country" because Kamala ain't going to significantly change the course of the DNC or the personal at it's helm.
That's the big difference, and why I don't think we have to worry about the SC this time installing a republican.
We would likely see some civil unrest and strife if they tried, but hopefully that would at least convince Kamala to actually do something about the SC instead of just fucking ignore it like Biden did.
The Republicans couldn't even elect a House Speaker, you think they'll be able to agree on a new Presidential candidate this late in the game? Trump is the only thing holding the GOP together. Without him they've got nothing.
Seriously?
The one defining feature of Republican voters is their willingness to fall in line and vote for anyone with an R by their name.
There's some diehard Trumpers who are voting specifically for trump, but Republican turnout is fairly steady (obviously population changes in four years). What decides elections is how good a candidate Dems put forward.
We're the party that needs a good candidate to vote for and has to keep it's voters happy
Trump since the 80s has gotten away with deplorable crimes and was still liked. He doesn't know how to handle hate and reality that only freaks like him. Then you add a black women kicking his ass, chief kiss.
So he is doing what he did while President?
As President, he spent a lot of time doing rallies and fundraisers for other GOP candidates. He was a perfect little spokes model who could open wallets and hype candidates.
Now he's just in full on burnout. He's got no faith left in his campaign and doesn't want to admit he's fading.
Either it's a demotivated Trump, or it's a Trump who figures that if he's going on the offensive now, then the Harris campaign will still have time for a comeback.
Friends don't let friends get lazy, remind everyone to vote!
Respectfully, fuck this noise and take the thing seriously. The election is not decided until the votes are counted and the secessionists (if any) are shot or incarcerated.
Yeah let’s not repeat the mistakes of 2016 that put him in the white house the first time
Trump is being told by his donors that the voting isn't important because they'll litigate the shit out of the election if they lose.
What's important to understand is that Trump isn't the one in charge. He's a useful idiot.
Trump's motivation isn't Project 2025, or abortion bans, or anything at all for that matter. He has no principles. He agrees with the last person who spoke with him. That's how his brain works. What Trump cares about is having the power to pardon himself and make all of his criminal charges go away.
So a bunch of fundies see an opportunity. THEY have an agenda. THEY have a plan. THEY tell Trump, WE WILL get you into power by hook or by crook. We'll pay for your campaign because we know you're broke. We'll get our people in place everywhere we can. From a vote perspective, you're going to lose this election...WE are your only chance to avoid prison and (potentially worse) no longer being useful to Putin and falling out a high window.
Trump is golfing not because he's given up. But because a) he's miserable and has no interest in being the president, but he has no choice if he wants to avoid prison. and b) He honestly believes he doesn't need the votes because his "people" (who he's stupid and egotistical enough to think that HE controls rather than the other way around) have it wrapped up for him.
What a demented fool U R!
Yet he still found time to save the world! The Orange Lion!! 👊✌️
You are a brainwashed little lemming!
Hopefully age is catching up to him