Joe Biden will lose. There is no more disastrous option. “Who knows what will happen” is at least in the grouping of “maybe they won’t lose”.

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn!

All the best Russian influence agents join servers that are in close proximity to their office. I moved from lemmy.world to sopuli after .world’s performance was unreliable because they seemed to have a reasonable block list and were in the goldilocks zone of neither too big nor too small. And my mastodon account is hosted on an EU server because I don’t think the US has good data privacy rules. Turns out internet services still work when it’s overnight in their home time zone.

If we’re going to be ruled by Old Ones, they might as well be Great.

Biden will pull more moderates and centrists, the key group in this election

Says fucking who?

It’s especially obvious in that the sentence could have just stopped at “will remain bloodless”. We’ll win through ideas and voting and law is enough of a statement. If someone else introduces violence then it’s of course not bloodless. “My political movement will be bloodless unless someone commits violence against us” isn’t a thing you need to say. The threat to violence is only meaningful if the right is initiating violence.

Sentiment polls absolutely do matter when the question is whether the sentiment is only coming from trolls and biased media.

“We don’t know”/“We can’t know”/“There isn’t enough evidence” is not a diagnosis. I’m not that clueless. lol

Also you:

You say that as if he has dementia, which he does not.

So um, guess you are?

You’re literally diagnosing him! “He doesn’t have dementia” is a diagnosis! And yeah, you definitely don’t have experience with aging. People change. Not all of them change fast, but that’s not what you said. You said it’s just a year, he must be the same. And that’s just not how it works.

But I think you’re an ignorant troll, you think I’m a mean troll. I don’t think either of use has any hope of satisfying the other, so respond or not, it doesn’t matter.

And to add to this, it’s not always obvious that a dementia patient is having an episode if you don’t have the context and structure to recognize what they’re saying is nonsense. They can string together a perfectly coherent story and what tips the listener off is that they’re referring to someone who is long dead or an activity they couldn’t possibly have done recently.

And Trump isn’t tripped up by forgetting things, because his statements are already made up. He can just flow through and keep telling his story because it’s already all just stream of consciousness bullshit. He never needed facts in the first place because he can just say whatever he wants or divert into talking about sharks and electrified boats.

Auto-coups are a lot easier than coups of a rival, because you control the police/military that would defend the government and can delay them from responding, like Trump did.

Why are you so sure he doesn’t have it?

Huh??

Maybe if I bold it you’ll answer the question. Why are you sure he doesn’t have dementia? You said he definitively doesn’t have it.

You don’t know me and you’re already talking down to me like I haven’t had that terrible life experience. I wouldn’t be so confident if I were you. Especially when you say things like “That sure looked consistent with early dementia.” Like, bruh.

That’s a “how dare you”, not a no. Anyone saying that an old person will be the same one year to the next hasn’t experienced that they very much can change over the span of a year. Like, that’s a crazy statement to make with regards to the aging of the elderly.

Wait, do you actually think everyone on a Finnish instance is from Finland? That’s really really stupid.

they help prevent trained employees and their skills from being poached given optimal pay according to market forces by competitors.

This is fundamentally an anti-free-market opinion. But Republicans don’t care about markets, they care about corporations.

It’s the Chamber of Commerce statement, so it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the law. It is just personal opinion.

No kidding. Even regular staunch capitalists recognize that regulation is sometimes necessary. Regulation against anti-competitive practices exists because a market left to its own devices will devolve into monopolies that will be much less efficient than a competitive market. Non-competes are just employers establishing monopolies over their workforce.

You say that as if he has dementia, which he does not. Why can’t we accept that maybe the debate was a “bad day”? Why are we pretending it’s now the norm for how he behaves?

Why are you so sure he doesn’t have it? That sure looked consistent with early dementia. And we don’t need this to just not be the norm, we need it to be a single solitary event that never happens again. Uncommon bad days are too many bad days. He needs to be “on” too often to trust to chance that he’s never going to do this again.

I mean, the Dark Brandon stuff didn’t come out from him sitting behind his desk.

Dark Brandon was a meme coopted by his social media team for in-your-face policy. It had nothing to do with him speaking. And again presidents can just do policy and speeches at their own pace, candidates need to be interactive and ready.

Why are we pretending that Biden is a whole different person than he was even one year ago over this?

You haven’t had to have frequent contact with an elderly relative have you? A person that old absolutely can go from sharp as tack to having noticeable cognitive difficulties in a year. That’s a long time for an elderly person.

The most obnoxious part about Ohio is that it was an entirely self-inflicted wound. We could have just scheduled our convention before the deadline and not trust Republicans to go out of their way for Democrats. And in the end it’s not even because we think we can win the state, we just want to give local politicians a boost because people turn out to vote for president.

You can be a good president by hiding in your office and approving good policy made by your excellent team, but you can’t become president by doing those things, especially when you’re down. The nominee needs to be able to be coherent in public a lot, doubly so after having what appears to be a very public senior moment. People who have been around old people know that a few good days doesn’t mean their loved one is better, it just means they were good days.

In 2020 the prevailing wisdom was he was going to be a one-term president who couldn’t say it because he’d be a lame duck. And by the time I was able to vote there were only two options, Biden and someone older than him. 80-90% of the party wasn’t proactively choosing to have an 85 year old president when voting in those later states, they were voting for who they wanted to be president in 2020. A second term isn’t a forgone conclusion for the oldest president in history.