But anyone who is uninformed to that level is completely unlikely to watch a debate. I mean, if they invested five minutes a night (maybe even a week) listening to the top news headlines, they wouldn’t be undecided.

A debate is probably a waste of everyone’s time other than for entertainment value and selling clicks.

It’s such a beautiful area. We used to rent a houseboat on Shasta lake as a regular summer vacation. But the political signs you see there are just insane.

There’s a historical place near my house (Southern California) that was built in 1903 and has a bunch of bas-relief swastikas in the decorations. They have little signs up explaining that the building predates adoption of the symbol by Nazis, but it’s really strange to walk around and see them.

Well, I think that’s incorrect, but neither of us will ever know.

The only quibble I have with this is that, as the article points out, projection is generally a subconscious things people do. I firmly believe Trump knows exactly what he’s doing and he accuses others first so if they accuse him it looks like “no, you are!” It’s just one strategy in his con man book.

If you read the article, it gets from the one to the other. It’s actually worth reading.

Nice thought, but it won’t matter. Trump will just have Ronnie Jackson say he’s never seen a man as healthy as Trump in all his years, and that Trump will likely live to be 250 years old, and even then he’ll only die because he’ll realize he’s solved all of the world’s problems and there’s nothing left to live for.

(There are too many “ands” in that sentence, but I can’t be bothered to fix it)

The flip side is that people who live in states with a big land area but relatively small population have a way oversized vote compared to people who live in high population states. Why should a small number of people in the Midwest be able to outvote the majority?

Either the ‘N’ in “sandwich” is backwards or it’s a large, lowercase ‘n’

I only partially agree. Yes, with the recent debates featuring Trump frothing at the mouth and saying completely insane and hateful stuff, if a debate doesn’t have that it’s worth connecting on. But people do care about content.

With this debate as an example, lots of people commented on the “sanewashing” that Vance was doing - trying to give plausible explanations for things Trump has said or done - but it’s just not as outrageous as what we’re used to. And the Republican base was largely happy with that he said, even when it was demonstratively false.

I think people care, but it’s twigs being added to a pile of logs.

Seems hard to believe that this debate moved the needle much on either side. They both performed well, there were no big gotcha moments, and each said the stuff that their base would want them to say. Neither seemed unhinged, both were well spoken.

Vance said some stuff that was total crap, but that’s not a problem for anyone considering voting for Trump. I just don’t see that there’s any way anyone’s mind was changed.

You know, it was very different than I expected. There were quite a number of times when one of them said “Well I agree with most of that he just said.” Vance is pretty smooth, too. Much of what he said was total crap, but it wasn’t the Trump-style hateful vomit. It was the most cordial debate I’ve seen in a while, though there were some strong disagreements.

See, this is an example of why he likes Putin. If you publish negative stories about Putin, regardless of truth, you’re going to fall out a window. Trump wants that.

The point is that if the rules aren’t grounded in science, it’s not science fiction. You can have the trappings of science, like space travel or whatever, but if people are moving objects and doing impossible acrobatics by using a magical force, it’s fantasy.

Though not mine, I personally think that definition works better than most. Still, if you pin me down, I’d say that there’s a spectrum, with hard SF (where everything is rigorously anchored to scientific principles) at one end, and pure fantasy (with magic and such) at the other. There are lots of things between those endpoints, with some being closer to one or the other, and some being very much in the middle.

Oh, it’s fantasy

I always liked the distinction (I forget who originated it) that science fiction is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by physics and fantasy is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by the author.

As other people have said, it would be way worse to have him him assassinated. If it’s looking like he’s going to lose, I could see the people who want the US unstable to prefer assassinating him instead.

It’s not like wasp nests are much less organized on the inside. Here’s an example.

I wish more thought had gone into the legend and the categories were either mutually exclusive or they used multiple dots. For instance, the very first item on the list -an Obama birtherism - is a blue dot for a public statement, but it also should have been a black dot for racism.

There seems to be this disinformation campaign trying to spin it that the reason the US government has an issue with TikTok is because they don’t want the free expression of ideas. What’s going out on TikTok isn’t what the government cares about. It’s that the company is controlled by the Chinese government and the potential use of it for spying and major privacy violations is significant.