Xhieron

Good for them. At least somebody did.

We all called it. Didn’t matter. Time to move to the next box.

Except there’s no such thing as a hollow blue suit! Any alternative to Biden has to be a real live human being, probably with real live political aspirations of their own. That means they’re going to want to win. Anybody who stands any chance of being anywhere remotely close to competitive also stands a chance of outright winning under better circumstances in four years.

You’re asking an ambitious politician to take a real, serious risk of political suicide just to save face, and the reality is that no matter who your replacement is, polling better than Biden isn’t a win condition. Winning the election in November is the only good outcome. All other outcomes are bad not only for the nation but also personally for whoever replaces Biden.

Sure, you can run a would-never-win-or-even-run-anyway candidate, but like I said: that’s essentially conceding the election, and Biden can do that on his own.

Uh… okay, bro. You know that Donald Trump is also running in this election, right? Biden could be running single digits, and it still wouldn’t change the calculus: If a Biden alternative can’t beat Trump, they’re not going to put an albatross around the neck of their political career just to lose in November.

Newsom was on MSNBC singing Joe’s praises, just like he would have done regardless, because Newsom wants to be president, but Newsom also polls worse than Biden. That’s not hypothetical. Those polls already exist, and a drop in Biden’s numbers isn’t automatically a boost for Newsom. If Newsom thinks losing in 24 hurts his viability in 28, he wouldn’t do it. And who could blame him? It’s five months to the election.

The point is: It’s possible that all of the options are bad. Biden was in the mid-forties before the debate and the thirties after. He went from near toss-up to probably losing if the election were yesterday/today. Newsom might out-poll Biden today, but that’s not the contest.

The contest is with Trump. It’s not good enough to poll better than Biden. You have to actually carry all of Biden’s states and then some. If I’m Newsom and deciding whether to try to cobble together a five-month campaign and limp to November to save the DNC from itself and protect Amtrak Joe’s legacy when I’m starting 15 points in the hole or run my own campaign against the likes of a Haley or DeSantis also-ran once Trump is term-barred, dead, or both in four years, I’m not taking a risk at the convention unless someone makes me very, very confident that I could win.

And there’s the rub. Newsom wants to be president, and he’d love to be president in six months, but he’s not going to take over a campaign that’s already lost. If the party thinks Trump wins no matter what–not an unreasonable conclusion–why on earth would they burn their best shot of a rebound in 28?

Ratings and clicks–same thing they wanted with the debate.

This probably doesn’t work, and it’s probably not as good idea as anyone hopes (genuinely or not). It might happen anyway, but no matter what, we’re coasting toward a second Trump presidency, just like all the Russian agitprops here wanted all along.

If Biden is polling down 10 points or worse at the convention, they could drag someone else onto the stage, but my suspicion is that no one else outperforms him on short notice, even after his abysmal performance in the debate.

A few reasons:

1. Newsom probably doesn’t want it. If he calculates Trump wins either way (not unreasonable), he’s not going to want that loss on his record since he’s already gunning for 28. He would be the best chance at getting an up-and-comer who already has good name recognition and looks and sounds good.
2. Harris. If Harris wants it, she has a lot of leverage to make it hard or outright impossible for the party to push anyone else out in front of her. She’s a poor candidate for a lot of reasons, but she’s also the most attached to Biden. That’s both good and bad for her. If they want to run anyone else, they have to have her playing ball too. Ask yourself, if you were Kamala Harris, would you give up your only conceivable chance at the Oval in favor of another non-Biden candidate? Remember, in any scenario the odds are good Trump wins anyway.
3. The truth may be that the party would rather just let Trump win. That sounds unthinkable, but this isn’t a secret cabal of idealists we’re talking about: it’s a bunch of self-interested rich people who want to put themselves in power. Getting them to do anything for the public good is difficult under the best circumstances. They could easily decide–rightly–that Biden is still their best shot at beating Trump. That was the call in 2020, and it paid off. Don’t forget that many of these same names being batted around now were active in the party four years ago. Newsom loses to Trump, and he’s largely seen as the best alternative. If you’re running the party and looking at those odds, you should run Biden if you actually want the best chance at winning. You might decide it’s just a lost cause and start planning for a four year long nightmare.

deleted by creator

Really? Didn’t stop me…

Just cheat? Whatever happened to class cheating? In the old days if the game was too hard and you didn’t have a big brother to do it for you, you just put in the godmode code or turned on a trainer or something.

Some games are just hard. That’s what makes getting good at them feel rewarding. The Souls games haven’t really been for me either (due to the pking–not so much the difficulty), but it’s not like the game makers owe me anything.

That’s a game of legal Russian roulette I wouldn’t want to play. Eventually he’s going to rip off the wrong person, and in the meantime all his victims have the option of sitting on their claims (SOL notwithstanding) to find out if he ever makes any money.

The problem with a punishment mesmer, defensive juggernaut anything, and turret engie is that they result in degenerate gameplay. Turrets can’t be allowed to succeed in PVE (see: Lake Doric), and none of these class fantasies can be allowed at all in PVP.

Turrets and juggernauts turn into turtling bunkers that either grind play to a halt or turn into raid bosses, and the only way to balance them is to essentially make the style of play unfun for the person who wants it. “Being unkillable” or “controlling this space” can’t be supported in a competitive game mode. Now, you can balance this by just splitting everything and making the specs unplayable or wildly different in competitive modes, but that means you’re now devoting the dev resources to build the thing twice (for both modes), yet players can only really enjoy it in PVE. From a design perspective, that’s a really poor return on investment for an elite spec.

Punishment mesmer worked in GW1 because you had much better defined roles in all game modes with less overlap, and there was ability parity between players and NPCs, so you could interact with an enemy mob essentially the same way you’d interact with an enemy player. In GW2, you can’t punish a playstyle because playstyles aren’t that well defined, and you can’t create a niche for hex gameplay because they gave everybody else the mesmer toys (see: Torment and Confusion). If you try to make a spec that depends on them even more than certain mesmer specs already do, the byproduct will be turning revs into gods (again). There’s also no energy denial in GW2, and you can’t give a player a bar full of interrupts because everybody already has as many interrupts as the game can support without being catastrophically unfun. GW2 is just the wrong kind of game for GW1’s mesmer–like a lot of things that were better in GW1.

If you ask me, we don’t need more elite specs. We need more non-elite specs–stuff we can combine more freely with what we already have–and we need the elites to be “de-elited” so that the power level of the vanilla specs have better parity with their elite counterparts. I know they’ve taken a pass at this before (or two or three), but it has clearly not panned out. The presence of multiple options for ranged elementalists, for example, is definitely something that needs to be supported.

Windows 10 LTSC 2021 ends support in 2027 (although it doesn’t matter quite as much). And it’s likely that the Win 11 LTSC later this year will necessarily be free from much of 11’s bullshit. Linux is still the right call, but for those of us who need to run a Windows machine for whatever reason, there are alternatives, so, you know… yarr.

That was the point… Did you reply to the wrong comment?

That’s flattering, but I was actually just expecting a press release. So where is it?

She sure can’t. Sounds like all OpenAI has to do is produce the voice actor they used.

So where is she? …

Right.

It’s a safe bet. The number of voters Biden loses if he were to change positions enough to appease any authentic anti-Zionists (as opposed to agitprop elements, for whom no position would be good enough to silence) would dwarf the number of voters he might gain. That might not mean he gets reelected, but hell, changing positions at all would cost him votes. Like I said: all choices are bad. It would have been a political disaster for any president, because every voter who cares enough about it to be a single-issue voter is entrenched enough to not be swayed at all unless the other side is completely alienated.

He can’t find a way to appease both sides? Well what does that look like? What’s the position that appeases both staunch Zionist voters and the subsection of the anti-Zionist protestors who vote? That’s not a rhetorical question. Every other US politics-adjacent post on Lemmy recently has been OP or one of their comrades criticizing Biden for his position on Israel, and I’m genuinely interested to hear someone articulate the nuanced position that Biden should supposedly take that he’s currently failing at, and how he’s supposed to do that and not immediately lose all prospects of reelection. FFS, even characterizing this as a division between “pro-Israel” and “against genocide” is already throwing nuance out the window. From where I’m sitting, Joe Biden has as nuanced a position as he can, because the nature of foreign relations in the Middle East in 2024 is itself nuanced and, for US interests, profoundly precarious. If you want nuance, you better be prepared to swallow a healthy dose of realpolitik alongside it, and that’s something that as of yet I’ve not found any noble armchair advocates and red-shadowed “patriots” willing to do.

It’s a safe bet, by a lot, and the calculus doesn’t really change no matter how much nuance you apply, because with every statement you’re always trading some nebulous number of single-issue pro-Palestine/anti-Zionist voters for a much larger group of pro-Israel/Zionist voters.

Then you have folks like the OP who are essentially working as a thinly-veiled propaganda arm of Hamas/Russia/etc., and it really muddies the signal-to-noise analysis on the issue.

It’s a problem for Biden, but there’s no winning. Trump doesn’t have the problem only because he’s not the incumbent right now, so he can hem and haw and try to deflect from the reality that he’s much worse on the issue–like every other issue–for people who align even a little bit with any policies left of center.

So Biden just has to basically take the hit, because the Democrats care about functional government and stable diplomacy and foreign policy relationships, whereas the GOP, as the party of dysfunction, white grievance, and ethno-religious fascism, isn’t saddled with the same considerations. Biden actually tried–and partially succeeded–in slowing down arms shipments to Israel, and the GOP threw a shitfit in Congress because they want those arms shipments: Their donors want them, and they can hang it on Biden’s neck no matter what, because people like OP will continue to go to bat for them.

AI = Absent Indians

The nepo babies wouldn’t serve–same as always. And the political unpopularity of conscription has never changed. The last war draft is still in living memory, and US current military activity hasn’t been an improvement in terms of public appetite.

The US introduces conscription again, and there’ll be riots–and I don’t mean “some kids camped at college and the jackboots locked them up” protests; it’ll be government-building burning, widespread-looting riots.

If you want to do conscription, the kids have to trust the government not to kill them for oil.