I could try to make a persuasive argument either way, but the real answer is probably: It depends on the economy because candidate quality doesn't matter that much, and Trump is the proof...

For a moderate Democrat like me, it'd be a pretty depressing one, though. I guess I'd side with AOC; I disagree with her on some issues but she's smart. Newsom seems like an empty suit with limited political upside.

Normally rooting for our athletes to beat Canada's or Denmark's feels like rooting for the Mets to beat the Cubs. It's morally neutral, they're just Our Guys.

In this context, it feels like rooting to make some of the worst people happy and some perfectly nice people we've already offended sad.

I'm a believer in patriotism and I have no problem with international competition, so normally I'm more than happy to root for Team USA and don't understand Americans who don't. But I have to admit, this administration's policies toward our (former?) allies make that feel a little awkward. 1/2

I'd say:

Trouble With Tribbles
City On The Edge of Forever
Balance of Terror
Space Seed
The Doomsday Machine

Okay. I genuinely appreciate you responding to this, because I see a lot of people saying "that can't happen" and few saying why, other than citing laws I'm not confident Trump's people will obey. So thank you, really, for explaining further.

What then? Do they even need a "mechanism" to just... pretend the election turned out as they wanted? Obviously that's illegal, but what if they don't care? What stops them from doing that? It seems to me we would then be at the point of "They rule forever" or "Civil War." Both Very Bad outcomes!

Suppose Trump declares victory and then Mike Johnson, who opposes Trump on nothing, says "Yup, he's right, we won." And every GOP congressperson just refuses to vacate their office. Then Democratic states sue and John Roberts, who opposes Trump on very little says, "Yup, that's right, they won." 2/3

I know I'm going to sound stupid, but this is the scenario that's been worrying me. Not "they'll take over the polling places" or "they'll literally rig the vote." The one where Trump says the day after the election, "Actually there was fraud and R's won every close seat." So I have to ask. 1/3

People complain about choosing the lesser evil as though ending up with the greater evil is no big deal. But in fact, it's ending up with the lesser of two goods that's no big deal; those times when you land on the greater evil can be truly disastrous. Witness, well... everything since January 2025.

Dang it, the end of that first post should say BE made, obviously, but I'm not gonna rewrite the whole thread to fix a typo...

So that's why I'm on the center-left. Basically I want everybody to my right to calm the eff down and everybody to my left to focus on getting back to that state of basic-okayness before we start trying to build some utopian money-free Star Trek society.

I may be wrong, just stating my perspective.

And then everything just went bat-crap crazy, like much of the country contracted a zombie rage virus from a horror movie! And all kinds of demons we'd been making real progress against or had successfully fended off came flooding out of Pandora's box in force (to metaphorically mix genres)...

Were there policy arguments to be had about things like immigration, drugs, health care? Sure.

But we had one of the wealthiest and most successful societies in history. It was not perfect, but looking back across human history, you won't find much better than the USA on Escalator Day, 2015.

Well then, considering he has no morality and his mind is a dustbin full of spiders, we might be in trouble.

I'm a centrist Dem who's hesitant to upset the status quo; I want our pre-Trump system back, so I worry about breaking more than we fix. But I'm also a Civil War buff and a huge Grant fan.

Basically "Be like Grant, not McClellan" feels microtargeted to persuade me personally. It's a good argument!

We are deep into dystopian sci-fi territory now. Like, this Vance quote is the twist halfway through an alternate history novel that leads to The Final War and has everybody wandering around a post-apocalyptic wasteland by 2150, trading scraps of old technology for uncontaminated food...

Keep the faith, Steve! There will always be doubters, but Christmas is a time of magic.

I have an extensive Christmas music collection (yeah, I know I'm a nerd) and I had to look this up: I have three different versions each of O Come All Ye Faithful and O Little Town of Bethlehem, but no O Holy Night. Like you, I feel like I can almost hear Elvis singing that one, but I guess not...