Factually, that’s what he did during his time in office as well. I’m not sure what they thought had changed.
Ever play an arcade video game from the 1980s? I’m talking about the ones in the arcades where you had to pop a quarter into the machine to play.
Here’s the thing about those games. The first 2 levels or so were usually pretty easy. Weak AI opponents. Easily distinguishable patterns. But then you hit level 3 or 4. And the difficultly skyrockets. With absolutely no warning. You go from “Hey, this game ain’t so bad” to regretting all of your life choices. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to get owned, hard. Only a few people could get past a couple of levels, and only the best of the best were skilled enough to be able to play as long as they wanted until they clocked the game.
That’s where we’re at now. Trump played those first couple of levels. Clinton was a divisive figure in her own right and treated the 2016 race like she could skate to victory too. Biden had weaknesses that Trump could easily exploit. The real game has begun and Trump has absolutely no idea how to actually play. So Trump wants to start the game over. He doesn’t want to make it to level 3 because he knows he’ll never beat level 3. He’s looking for a reset switch like on the Atari 2600 so he could keep playing the first two levels over and over and over. Because he knows how to beat those.
But he can’t. So he’s essentially stopped playing the game. He’s telling everybody in the arcade how rigged that machine is, the joystick’s broken, and you need to hit the fire button 10, 12, 15 times for it to fire. And he’s getting jealous that all the cool kids in the mall aren’t listening to him, and are circling around the new girl who popped her quarter in and has gotten to levels Trump hasn’t even seen before, while he goes to the corner of the arcade, pops a quarter into the dusty, old Pong machine, and wonders why nobody fucking cares.
Only semi-related:
Hunter S. Thompson took great pains to speak in sports metaphors, because that’s the language of “middle America.”
I’ve thought that, for a while now, video games have become the language of “middle America” and whoever can speak to the gamers in their language will capture their minds.
Steve Bannon also understood this, and that’s why he succeeded in capturing many young men’s minds through Gamergate.
We need people better than Steve Bannon speaking this language and leaving gamers with positive, healthy understanding of the world around them.
Anyway, I write this because I think your video game metaphor really works here, and I think that’s the way to speak to a large portion of our populace now.
Anyway, I write this because I think your video game metaphor really works here, and I think that’s the way to speak to a large portion of our populace now.
I don’t know that arcade metaphors really work for most of the population now, though. Even when I was young they were dying.
I think we might be talking about two different types of “arcades” here.
The arcades where you go and play pinball and pac man and street fighter are the ones we’re talking about. That was the 80s. Those of us who remember those days fondly would probably be between 40 and 60. I don’t know about the rest of my middle-aged community members, but I ain’t planning on dying any time soon.
If you’re living in a place where 40-60 year olds are dying on the regular, you’re probably living around methheads.
while he goes to the corner of the arcade, pops a quarter into the dusty, old Pong machine
Correction, he puts a quarter into a pinball machine in the corner, then shortly after gets the tilt warning because he once again tries to cheat instead of having skill.
Tilts are perfectly valid in pinball tournaments, though. As long as the machine’s setup only warns you instead of stopping the game, it’s OK in most leagues. And if it does stop you, then you can continue to the next ball.
Interesting. It looks like the older games did just stop when sensing some movement, while newer ones allow it to some degree or times, so there’s a fudge factor that I guess a professional would know how much to push things. Some might take away the power ups and just let you finish that ball on a “vanilla” setup.
But he lost on level 2. The only candidate he’s beaten is Hillary, who’s one of the least popular politicians in the US.
He lost the first time. Then he inserted another quarter to continue and (essentially) beat him the 2nd time.
And after the brief intermission cutscene, he played level 3. He doesn’t like level 3. He even tried to call the attendant over so he could play level 2 again. And when the attendant said “Um…you’re on level 3 now, what’s the problem?”, he stopped playing. Because level 3 is fucking hard.
Trump is the kid who got good at PacMan. Then the arcade brought in MrsPacMan and no matter how high he scores and tries to get attention, the kid who scores well in Mrs PacMan is stealing his thunder because it’s harder. And he’s mad no one is paying attention to his New High Score because it’s irrelevant in the face of the new game. But he can’t get good enough at MrsPacMan, so he’s sulking on PacMan setting new scores and slowly filling the board while his friends try to give him the new Guide for how to score better or get farther in MrsPacMan. Trying to get him to take on the new kid. But he’s just broken from constantly being the loser every time he 2 players. He’s scared of it because it’s a new age where it’s not a solved game, the enemies react to you, and he’s not fast enough anymore to handle that and it scares him - no matter how much his friends try to get him to get good.
He’s has a mastery of gish galloping. There’s no way I could ever approach half of what he does.
But that’s about the only thing I can think of that he’s good at. And it’s definitely something he’s good at due to severe character flaws and mental development issues, not exactly a learned skill or intentional thing he applies. But good nonetheless.
Excuse me, but Trump would never play Pac Man. He can’t handle Kamala Harris alone. He’d be complaining about having to go up against 4 non-white opponents at once.
And he’d certainly never play Ms. Pac Man. Sure, it’s one thing playing an unidentifiable yellow mass that runs around popping pills and doing the same thing over and over while trying to avoid all the non-white people in town, but there’s no chance in hell he’d play as a female.
Wonderful metaphor. Although it’s hard to suspend disbelief in a story about Trump wanting to / knowing how to play video games. He strikes me as the type that’ll buy an arcade but never set foot in it. And then remove all that is good about it and fill it with ticket games.
Although it’s hard to suspend disbelief in a story about Trump wanting to / knowing how to play video games.
Have you played those old games? Usually, the first level is easy. Easy enough where you actively have to try to lose. I mean, you get 3 lives. That means you have to make not just bad decisions, but the worst possible decisions, over and over and…oh.
Never mind. You’re right.
It wasn’t like a switch got flipped, no one would keep playing.
They’d make a tiny segment super hard so you’d have to drop a couple bucks to get past it. Go back to easy for a little. Then hit another hard part.
It’s basically the whole reason for boss fights.
Once games started developing storylines, plots, etc. it was like that. It was an intentional strategy developed to keep you playing. But early developers weren’t thinking that far ahead. The idea was to give you a couple of easy levels so you feel you got your 5 minutes worth of entertainment worth, then start punishing you at level 3 or 4 so you’d lose and the next person would play.
And some were made by simple oversight. Space invaders’ increasing difficulty was solely the result of hardware limitations of the time that just happened to result in the exact difficulty spikes they were looking for. As a programmer, I could, for example, set level 1 vs. an opponent that was slow as festering dog shit, but be lazy and just double his speed with every level. As long as the player’s speed stays the same, it would become nearly impossible to win in a couple of levels.
Either way, the results were the same: 25 cents for about 5 minutes worth of entertainment. That was the goal of the day. As you mentioned, they fine tuned it by the mid 80s with games like Mario and the like. but those early games were meant to get you off the cabinet as quickly as possible so soneone else could pop in their quarter.
set level 1 vs. an opponent that was slow as festering dog shit, but be lazy and just double his speed with every level. As long as the player’s speed stays the same, it would become nearly impossible to win in a couple of levels.
Exactly, and long term people would stop playing because they always get stuck about the same time.
It’s like how humans respond to rewards, a steady consistent reward is kind of motivating, it’s why we go to work in the morning
But what works a shit ton better is sporadic rewards that have a tiny tiny chance of paying off.
That’s why people get addicted to slot machines and not working at McDonald’s. If a slot machine paid out 75 cents for every dollar everytime, no one would play.
Have them win $7.50 every tenth time they put a dollar in tho, and people will flush their entire lives away chasing that 1/10 of a time they “win”.
So if you really want to exploit gamers, you can’t steadily increase difficulty. Linearly or exponentially, it doesn’t matter. To hook people they need those “wins” and they’ll keep dropping quarters or spinning loot boxes.
In coin operated video games, that’s when things get easy
A better example with Space Invaders is once they beat a level, they get to the next one and it’s slow again due to the amount of enemies on the screen. Letting the player get that easy time again hooks them. If the next level they were all as fast as the last one from last level, it wouldn’t have been as addictive
This is an interesting article - thanks for sharing! I found this snippet noteworthy:
According to one former aide who served in the White House under the former president, Trump has lost the plot.
“The stakes for Trump this election are arguably the highest they’ve ever been. His criminal cases don’t go away if he loses. Yet he seems to be phoning it in, running a remarkably low-energy, undisciplined campaign,” explained Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump spokesperson. “From spending days off the campaign trail golfing to coming up with frankly weak nicknames like ‘Kamabala,’ it feels like he’s lost his mojo.”
That is a good point about the criminal cases not going away if he loses, right? It’s interesting how it’s openly stated by the former aide.
I’m unable to muster any sympathy for the felon’s perpetual state of stewing.
He must think that “his” SC will protect him regardless, so he has an out if he loses. Or, he knows about the plan to ratfuck the election regardless of the outcome.
A. Win it. (Looking increasingly unlikely)
B. Steal it. Most of the fake electors are still in place, they’ve had four years to hire a new sleepers
C. Coup 2.0 historically the Democrats haven’t been very smart about things and it’ll totally blindside when you pull it again only this time with more people. All those people that got locked up in serious consequences we’ll just tell them that we’ll pardon them again
D. Civil War 2.0. if he doesn’t win it, and can’t steal it, and if there’s actually military protection around the Capital for 2.0. he’ll just openly call for the south to rise again. Only this time it’s not the south, it’s the rural areas, hell plan a Vietnam style offensive where the rural armed people lay siege everywhere.
My real actual best guess is he’s tired. He’s old, he’s out of shape, he’s stressed to the nines and he’s just trying to blow off the stress, he probably does have a plan b in a plan c. His actual plan d is probably two take a flight to Russia.
Even the recent movie “Civil War” didn’t touch on how and why such a thing started, because it just doesn’t make sense. There may be regional conflicts and riots, I don’t doubt that, but there’s no single organization to pull off a new Confederacy or whatever it would be. People watching the film even laughed at the union of Texas and California…what? Maybe that was a subtle message by the writers to not take the overall thing seriously, the movie wasn’t about the background events but about the characters in a hypothetical situation.
C and D might be slipping away from him, and possibly even B. They require a base that’s fired up to support him. He’s starting to lose that. They’ll still vote for him, and his best chance is to take a straight electoral college victory without the popular vote, but nothing extraordinary to subvert the system. If he doesn’t make that, though, he’s probably done.
I think the civil war one is actually the best case scenario.
Imagine a tired con man, not ready to fight, barely any energy. Calls for his die hard supporters to show up en masses and then a very tiny group show up and get arrested by the army (assuming the army doesn’t side with them).
Look at the age of the AVERAGE US farmer.
I am not worried about a civil war lead by the gravy seals.
For D the winning strategy for the United States needs to be to treat them as harshly as we treat eco terrorists. The viet cong had experienced Japanese and French occupation and so were more willing to engage in prolonged conflict. The confederacy had a lot of build up to prepare the common rabble for war. Martyrless crackdowns with a propaganda campaign can remove the will to fight.
Also a good point that a critical measure for the leader of the free world in the mind of a Trump staffer is how strong the nickname game is.
If he loses, I’m very curious to see if people in power still support him. I don’t think he will be very viable again in 4 years, physically or mentally.
He may become more useful if they let him get eaten by the legal machine. Then they’re able to invoke his image like they do with Reagan all the time, but with some martyrdom thrown in about how those mean libs kicked a former president when he was down, nevermind he got away with the crimes he’d be charged with for about a decade by then.
He might not ever serve time, but having everyone ignore him as useless as he sunsets might be an almost fitting punishment. We know the right struggles with empathy, so he could be facing some very frosty cold shoulders.
The best thing that could have happened for Republicans was trump got assassinated and Biden refused to step down.
Now they’re stuck with trump and Dems cut all their baggage by dropping their elderly infirm candidate.
trumps only real shot is stepping down to. Letting someone else run, and counting on them to pardon everything possible and the SC to take care of the rest.
That has a chance at least, but he can’t beat Kamala.
I’m glad he put in as much effort into this as he did to stopping Covid. I think I’d have preferred Biden to Kamala, but Joe just stopped bringing it, so I was getting nervous. Without years of Sleepy Joe and Brandon memes, Trump just can’t figure it out lately, and barely seems to be trying.
I’m in Pennsylvania, so I’m going to be voting the hell out of this election, and hopefully we’ll reach Jan 7 without drama. Then we can start getting on Kamala for her less than great positions, but until then, we got bigger things to deal with and I’m not going to crap much on the better of the 2 options. Post election is another story.
The Republicans couldn’t even elect a House Speaker, you think they’ll be able to agree on a new Presidential candidate this late in the game? Trump is the only thing holding the GOP together. Without him they’ve got nothing.
The best thing that could happen for Republicans and Trump is that they manage to fuck with the election enough that it doesn’t matter who wins the vote, either the Senate or the Supreme Court awards the election to Trump.
If he loses, there will be another Jan 6 with both sides being more ready for it, maybe even the supreme court tries to forcefully install him, then the cognitive decline will be so severe he no longer needed for the GOP, then global fascism goes from moderate decline to steep decline, with currently far-right parties pulling the “let’s pretend we’re moderates” game like Fidesz and many others will actually have to become moderate.
I just don’t feel the same energy. I see much less Trump signs and so on, though it’s picked up a little, it’s nowhere near what it used to be. The MAGA relatives aren’t going on about it at get-togethers, and when they do, it’s much less passionate than prior years.
I think any gathering in DC is not going to be met with the same light hands as before. There’s no one there to whip them into a frenzy, and with a Dem president and potential future president in charge, win or lose, I don’t feel they would go out sitting idle. Last time was the guy in the oval office trying to stay. Now he’s got to try to get in, and that seems to be a much steeper hill to climb.
Don’t get me wrong, even if Dems were to sweep everything, the fascists aren’t going to go quietly. Plenty of Americans have always been monarchists, and plenty supported the literal Nazis up until bombs fell. Then they just didn’t like those Nazis.
A large portion of this country still seems pissed the North won the Civil War, and until that gets resolved, the need to guard our country isn’t over.
What worries me is we’ll have a repeat of 2016 where everyone just assumed Hillary was going to win so they didn’t vote. Hopefully people will go out and vote regardless.
Absolutely. When I saw the headline I thought the same thing. Bad actors will try to sew exactly that thought in liberal circles as long as Dems have the momentum.
We can’t buy into it and need to resolve ourselves to fight like hell until election day, regardless of what “the polls” or “the experts” say. We need to make Kamala win in an indisputable landslide. We need to send a message that will make Trump and his acolytes political pariahs from now on.
I still curse the idiots I knew who skipped voting to attend “Hillary Won!” parties
Even if she had won I’d be pissed at them, you don’t celebrate a candidate’s victory if you don’t even bother voting for them.
thats not entirely accurate. Yes there was not as much enthusiasm behind Hillary as there was behind Obama, and she had a lot of (mostly invented) baggage, but she lost beacause she didnt campaign in a meaningful way lost a few swing states by a small margin (because yes, most reasonable people assumed she’d be the next president—and so many reasonable people assumed that eventuality that she won the popular vote by a wide margin).
Trump is noise and makes money for media outlets so they give him a massive and constant boost of brand recognition. They could’ve all been even mildly responsible in 2020 and just stop talking about the out of office former president but instead they kept him in the zietgeist which allowed him to run again this year.
I am still finding hope in the fact he did not win reelection the first time against a walking corpse elder statesman, and has not won elections for most of his endorsed down-ballot candidates in the past X years.
Anyway, people who do not want him in office should go and vote against him.
(and people who do want to see him in office again, sorry you shouldn’t vote for a lot of reasons but the biggest one being they’ll know who you are and that’s how they get you and also vaccines are mandatory for the polls so you should stay away and they’ll also forcibly swap your genitals and ITS REALLY TRUE FOLLOW ME ON FACETUBE)
I didn’t vote for Hillary because she sucked. I voted 3rd party that election. I’m definitely voting Harris/Waltz this time.
I didn’t vote for Hillary because she sucked
Well then, thank God she didn’t win!
Young people need to get enthusiastic to vote; and Hillary didn’t do that for them. Hillary didn’t do that for me-- because she’s best buds with Jamie Dimon and his ilk, and would only be joining a picket line when hell froze over-- but I still got out and made the only realistic vote against Trump because I’m a grownup.
It’s different this time because Democrats are finally being convincing that they’re not aligned with the billionaires, and because we’ve seen what a Trump presidency was actually like now. I think that will get more of the youth vote (with lots of GOTV effort, of course).
That’s because he only cares about when the election happens. He has plans in place to deny the results and to send his chud army out to terrorize. That’s all he is waiting for.
Yeah… this feels right. He seems to have checked out because the real campaign starts once he has lost. They’d rather use their dollars shielding him from further judicial consequence and preparing to set the country on fire once he loses.
Yeah, the whole “Dems cheated by pulling a switcheroo with candidates” line seemed to feed into that, but I also feel like there was a bit of slack-jawed “well we didn’t see this coming” panic in the Republican party as well
Thing is though, if that’s his plan, he still needs to keep his base energised. If all they see him do now is slack off and visibly not care, they may just think he’s given up, and not turn up on election day. Fraud will be harder to argue with meagre turnout of his voters. They may also be harder to mobilise in November if they got disenchanted with him in September.
So in a way, by stewing, sulking and slacking off, he may just not be doing himself any favours.
I wish every election could be this easy
Remember to still vote, there was a time when too many people just didn’t because it was assured Hillary would win.
Roe V. Wade was appealed and many women are dead now as a result
I know that the Republican party made this happen, but Democrats are absolutely complicit in letting it happen.
Obama promised to codify Roe v Wade when he had a super majority, and he just didn’t. Why didn’t he?
Ruth Bader Ginsberg could have retired and let us set a better judge into the Supreme Court, and yet the Dems somehow couldn’t look one presidential term into the future and try to have a contingency plan. Why?
Obama never had a supermajority. He got close but peaked at 59 senators in the senate and one in hospital. One shy of 60 is not enough.
He didnt codify roe because he didn’t have the votes. There were several “conservatives” democrat senators in the 2 yr span when they had a super majority, and they would not have voted for abortion protections at that time.
He instead focused on something he could do, which was give 100s of millions of Americans a chance at healthcare. Even that had single payer attached until it was scuttled last minute by Joe Liberman, an independent that cacused with dems that refused to cast the deciding vote for the ACA with single payer attached because his state of Connecticut had several large insurers HQ’ed there. Obama wouldn’t have needed Liberman, but Ted Kennedy died, and his replacement was a Republican.
RGB held on because she saw McConnel ratfuck Obama out of his Scalia replacement posting. She knew he would either get screwed again, or have to appoint someone conservative like Garland. So she waited for Hilary, who had a 70% of winning, but who didn’t.
The only things Obama did wrong was try to bridge the partisan divide. He was doing politics like it used to be, with compromise at its core. He didn’t realize, or at least didn’t want to realize, that the GOP had made politics a game of winner takes all. If he had, he could have placed two supreme court justices and got single payer.
Honestly I’m surprised Obama never grew a clue, the second he was for something Repbulicans had to be against it and vice versa.
The voters are complicit too then. Too many people didn’t vote in 2016. Maybe you’re complicit too! Let’s all finger point at everyone other than the people that did the bad things!
Or maybe we should just say the people doing the bad things are responsible for the bad things. Yeah I know taking things to a meta extremes is fashionable among intellectual types, but it’s really silly and doesn’t accomplish anything.
