Well, a lot of them were purged over the past few years. Fascists doing their thing you know. Things change though, that is one certainty. Not very predictably either.

Also note, I didn't exactly say it would be easy. Simply possible. Where, say, an amendment that made voting mandatory would be actually fully impossible.

I did. I saw a tired old man and a used car salesman. More importantly though, is I don't think almost everyone gives two shits about debates or polls. They know these two guys, know them well. What they offer is clear.

Additionally, I don't think a President has to be spry. They just need to be good at delegation, that is by far the most important skill. If you think about monarchy, the king did not need to run everything. Simply assign the tasks to people who did know all the details. Generals run the army. Finance ministers run economy. Diplomats run diplomacy. Etc.

No, there's a lot of us that don't want to surrender the incumbent advantage for the very common backlash-against-the-last-party phenomenon we've seen many times in the past decades.

We're just not as loud as everyone else, and our position makes terrible clickbait.

It'll definitely take some time, effort and big time coalition building. I doubt this specific one would be as impossible as it might seem though, due to the specifics.

Small govt types could be convinced to support something limiting executive power. That's all the libertarians and some conservatives. In a bloc with liberals and progressives, it could reach 2/3rds support with the populace. Barely. Then 2/3rds the states would have to ratify.

The fact that it would be for limiting the power of govt, is critical though. Fascists don't want small govt and just lie about it, but many people actually do. That becomes a middle position liberals can work with in a case like this, since we support separation of powers.

It's a battle that's been going for centuries, bigger than any one of us. Taking it personally only has drawbacks, it's not required for motivation. Breathing exercises can help.

Someone must always make decisions, a world where no decisions are made would devolve into a Mad Max type thing, where the fact that we are members of the animal kingdom would become very readily apparent. We used to decide these things with trial by combat, where the most skilled warrior (or who chose the most skilled as their champion) was right because God apparently said so, by making him so good at fighting. Still a person making a decision. Not far off from a world where you decide if someone was a witch by trying to build a bridge out of them.

The modern trick is dividing up the decision-making power so much that nobody can assemble it all into their personal toolkit and fully embrace corruption with no consequences.

Ah. Well, if all official duties of the Executive are immune to all laws lower than the Constitution itself, which itself bars him from very little and gives the Executive responsibility for enforcement of all laws, I guess a Constitutional Amendment is ultimately required then.

Authoritarians are irritating.

I know someone up there in years that enjoyed the Far Cry series. Didn't really expect that. shrug

More generally I think it'll commonly be something that relates to their interests when they were younger. Someone that retired 20 years ago from aerospace engineering might actually really enjoy Kerbal Space Program or even Outer Wilds, a former industrial foreman might like Factorio, for a retired military historian, bring on that Total War.

I can see games like Big Game Hunter and Truck Simulator being more broadly popular with certain segments. Some sports games maybe, like a tennis game or some golf thing maybe, I don't know much about those. A simpler, realism-leaning racing game maybe. Flight simulator works great here.

The main thing is I'd avoid games with lots of layers of game design and abstraction. It should do what it says on the tin, and there shouldn't be many steps or abstract mechanics between them and getting into the meat of the game and the core gameplay loop.

Minimal menus is probably a good idea. Like, a Paradox Interactive game would probably be a poor choice, just because they have so much you need to learn to become a proficient player. Fine text can be hard to read too, so menus and tooltips and complex status interfaces are usually gonna be pretty meh for most people. Can't play Starcraft if you have to squint and lean in every time you want to know how many minerals you have.

Want that learning curve to just get into the initial gameplay to be pretty gentle overall. The experience should be fairly intuitive to real life, and real life doesn't have that many menus and buttons. Usually, depending on their former career I guess.

Kudos for doing this btw.

(oh, and sorry I couldn't answer your core question)

Very well summarized, I think this hits the majority of the most relevant points.

I wanted to disagree with this, but I actually think you make a rather compelling argument.

Well, I am not that guy for the record. But if you read the article it said he automatically rejects any candidate that advocates for gun control. So, that means Biden is flat out for him, along with pretty much the whole dem party.

The amusing part to me personally was that such a person would normally just vote gop. But that specific guy cannot, for fairly obvious reasons.

A hardcore second amendment voter will usually resist any and all measures that restrict firearm possession, often on the basis of slippery slope arguments. Since the basis is rooted in a classic logical fallacy, they can be very difficult to persuade.

You're right though, Biden has been fairly moderate on gun control. So was Obama though, and you remember how they reacted to him?

Profound believer in the second amendment and profound supporter of racial justice. Yikes, I really feel for the guy, that's a tough one.

But ... but ... I'm so interesting...

I'd say both the parties are pretty capitalist. The repubs were interested in finding their challenger, they didn't know who it would be yet. The dems, all the way down to the majority of voters, were interested in supporting their incumbent, not interested in a chaotic primary fight.

I think that's still largely the case.

So, that's pretty much the same order as always, not seeing how that helps anyone.

And you can look up who runs if you want. You do not need to see debates to figure it out, someone announces after they file their paperwork, then its up to them to convince people to support them. You're pretending like the DNC needs to do all this work to serve us up a platter of great options, but ignoring that it's the candidates that determine how they get received. Don't forget, most Americans still hate the idea of communism, too, even if they don't actually know what it is.

This conspiracy theory nonsense is getting tiresome. The real world isn't that simple.

Okay then, next was SC and Nevada. How far do we have to go before we see these changes? And who was the contender that was hurt by the changes?

That's funny, I remember Iowa and NH going first like they do every year.

Polling, usually. Otherwise primary results. Most states did have their primary, btw, only a handful cancelled. Each state has their own way of doing it.

Can you name a candidate that was doing well at any point? Better than low single-digits? Dean was the only one I heard much about.

edit: You do remember the write-in uncommitted thing, right? Those were primaries.

Bernie decides if Bernie runs. He has already said he won't though, he'd have to change his mind. He's also getting up there in years unfortunately.