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.

“Listen to him”

Why? Why the fuck would you say that, man?

I gave Biden a pass for the “Doing the goodest job” flub during the ABC News interview, because how do you answer that question on the spot without sounding like a nihilist? Obviously, he should have said that trust in the system is important and that checks and balances will still be a thing even if he doesn’t win, but he opted for the feel-good sentiment of “At least we tried our best!”.

But for this? The question was “Trump is already tweeting about you mixing up Vice President Harris with his name and citing it as evidence that you are not fit for office. How do you respond to that?” and he says listen to him. WTF man. Biden is his own worst enemy right now. He could have walked off stage and said nothing.

I just want to see the evidence. Biden keeps saying that polls show he is the best choice to beat Trump, but he has either been neck-and-neck or losing by a few points in every recent major poll. So is he trying to tell us the polls are wrong? Or is there polling data that he has that they won’t release? How many Democrats of some noteriety were included in those polls? Were these polls taken before or after the debate debacle?

My mind would be more at ease if I could actually verify that Biden was the clear best choice. We’re just being told that there are no alternatives and we have to accept the gerentocracy is here to stay. The stark denial of reality that Biden is slipping in the polls during the most crucial election of our lives is not reassuring.

The only thing keeping me on his side right now despite my doubts is that party progressives are backing him while party centrists are trying to oust him. The centrists stand to lose the least if Trump wins, and likely have ulterior motives for going after him now unrelated to his mental fitness.

The very existence of Sarah Palin might give that theory a run for it’s money. She almost single-handedly tanked McCain’s election chances back when people doing bizarre and outrageous shit would actually convince voters that they were *checks notes* unqualified for the position.

“You sit and wait for hours and then are notified that the plane won’t leave, that they have no idea when they will. Where ticket prices have tripled. They don’t have the pilots to fly the planes, they don’t seek qualified air traffic controllers, and they just don’t know what the hell they are doing.”

Man who flies exclusively on private jets complains about public air travel.

Trump must really think we’re all fucking idiots.

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.

Trump lies so often that it’s no longer newsworthy to point it out. Even if Biden had debated well, the media probably wouldn’t have even scratched 5% of Trump’s falsehoods in a fact check and just focused on soundbytes of Trump saying dumb shit as usual.

It doesn’t fucking help that the right have been repeating a lie about Biden having dementia and, regardless of what the actual cause of his poor performance was on debate night, he put wind in their sails and essentially “proved them right all along” with his hoarse voice and incoherent train of thought. The seed has been planted and now some will start to wonder that if the Republicans were right about that, then what other farfetched nonsense could they also be right about?

It’s been 12 days since the debate and people are still talking about how bad it was. I’m pissed that the Biden team is treating this as if it’s no big deal when this one event was an absolute torpedo to his campaign that he might not recover from if he can’t convince both the Democratic establishment and the Democratic electorate that he is capable of doing another 4 years.

I’m worried about Biden’s chances because he won in 2020 while Trump’s atrocious term was still fresh in everyone’s minds. People apparently have short fucking memories because they all want to go back to Trump mismanaging the country and potentially ending free elections forever just to shave 30 cents off the price of eggs at the supermarket. Biden is still coasting on the policy-agnostic idea that the people will reject Trump more strongly than they will approve of him and I think that’s a huge mistake. He needs to be hammering his achievements home and also talking about stats from the Trump era and how they were great when Obama left office, terrible when Biden took office (due to Trump’s admin) and now improving thanks to him. That makes the best case for re-election, more than just convincing everybody to not vote for the openly fascist candidate because there’s no realistic alternative.

The system has made it impossible to live alone. You pretty much have to pair up with someone and split finances, whether that’s a romantic partner or a roommate or whatever. You have to be absolutely killing it to be younger than 40 and living alone right now.

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.

Trump is a lot less great than that.

Been saying that for years. It’s been a quarter millennium, how about we get the best and brightest minds from every field of academia, science, philosophy, and yes, even *shudder* religion, to get together and literally hold a constitutional convention? Just toss that old scrap of parchment out and re-write it from scratch, with modern language that is unambiguous and straightforward. If the rights enshrined in the Constitution that we hold so dear to us are actually that important, I’m sure they’ll make the cut for Constitution v2.0. But while we’re in there, we might as well clarify some stuff. Let’s clarify that 14th amendment, let’s define what a “well regulated militia” is, and so on.

Of course, the people in power like the ambiguity. It means that as long as someone somewhere could interpret the constitution in some way that is favorable to them, they can have it mean whatever they want when it suits them and as long as they keep the populace at each other’s throats with an unending culture war they know we’ll never organize enough to change that. It’s a bit of a pessimistic outlook. Our fates are controlled by people who like the dysfunction and that sucks because we could very easily fix a lot of the problems by unifying, but I don’t know if that’s possible at this point.

Has he tried claiming that he hasn’t been excommunicated and storming the Vatican?

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!

Correct. There’s absolutely nothing stopping Biden from doing exactly what Trump already tried and failed to do. He could put pressure on Governors to “find x number of votes”, submit a fake slate of electors to cast doubt on the results, outright threaten people if they don’t comply with his wishes. I’m sure this SCOTUS will find a way to interpret any of Biden’s would-be illegal actions as actually illegal, but tiptoe around Trump’s sedition and fraud.

I can’t believe that the prevailing opinion of the times is that the president can literally break the law, even ones specifically meant to bind them and only them such as campaign finance laws, and be immune from consequences under almost any circumstance as long as the court says it’s official. Congress effectively can no longer act as a check against the Executive. Only the Judicial can say what is official or unofficial.

This isn’t power anyone should have.

Except for the whole retiring from public life part. I wish Trump would just retire from life entirely.