The Rent Is Too Damn High guy would’ve made a comparatively great president, in hindsight.

Yeah, I guess that’s pretty subjective overall. In any case, they’re not so great now.

Ok, I’m not familiar enough with any of those to know what that means in this context. But in any case, weren’t his contributions to those games all ages ago? M&M in particular came out almost 30 years ago, right?

WotC was already pretty awful before the Hasbro acquisition, as I recall.

People have been complaining about WotC’s executive meddling in D&D and MTG for as long as I can remember, since before the 1999 Hasbro purchase. D&D 3e, mostly written after WotC acquired TSR but published shortly after Hasbro acquired WotC, was panned so badly that they dropped 3.5 just a couple years later. And 4e (including the first OGL fiasco) happened when Hasbro didn’t care about WotC because they were all-in on the Michael Bay Transformers movie. In fact, up until Stranger Things and Critical Role, Hasbro seems to have considered WotC the “Magic: The Gathering Money Printer” and done most of their meddling on that side of the house.

How much do we actually know about what Crawford is like outside of the WotC machine? He might be perfectly competent but held back by executive mismanagement.

Yeah, good point.

Ooh, good point. Well, they’re both going to ship from the factory in nonworking condition, so that’ll be tough to tell.

Absolutely gonna be “made in America” in that the application of the cheap Chinese gold decal to the cheap Chinese handset will be done in America.

It’s definitely going to be the Escobar Phone all over again. Anyone who accidentally receives one will get a foil-wrapped $150 Huawei handset with a preinstalled background image.

Easier than spotting the Cybertrucks?

1. Read a newspaper

2. Do that

I don’t know if that’s really true anymore. Or, maybe more accurately, I think we’re in between when that was true in the pre-social media age and when it’ll be true again after the social web breathes its last. There are just too many ways that megacorps, bad actors, and foreign agents can manipulate offline activity with online action.

Some of those things are manipulating small groups into large-scale action (see: Qanon), but misinformation and meme warfare also have a measurable effect on election, direct action, etc. Not to mention that local organization is best done online, and that has a very real effect.

Now, is offline action more important than online action? Absolutely, and if you’re saying that being an “online leftist” (as an identity) is a distraction, I think I agree with you. But online action is more than just a distraction, and to ignore it is probably counterproductive.

he also aimed for VP chair so one would expect him to act at “above state” level.

Nope, one would expect him to do the job he was elected to do. And he is.

We have way too many politicians already talking instead of acting. Working to alleviate real problems in Minnesota is way more effective, even on a nationwide level, than just talking.

But he’s also talking!

how many public gatherings did he address and outlined strategy for applying pressure on current Federal administration?

Several, and more coming.

I’m not a Minnesota resident, but it sure looks like he’s taking direct and local action as the governor of Minnesota. The guy seems to have done a lot of good work for his constituents. As a governor, that’s really the most effective action he can take right now.

I don’t know if I follow your argument here. Kennedy had already rejected the plan, more than a year and a half before his assassination.

They are cowards and weaklings who have no conviction in their actions.

This exactly. They want all the power that comes with being in a successful coup but none of the risk of being in an unsuccessful one.

Counterpoint: Giffords was shot, and nothing changed.

it was a setup. Not an organic shooting

Is there any evidence for that? I haven’t seen any.

Despair asserts omniscience. Don’t carry water for their narrative. Hope is spite.

So the last one there–whether or not it’s a moral idea, it’s important to remember that Trump was shot. Eleven months ago today, actually. It did nothing to stop this, and it did nothing to slow down his followers. Now, I don’t think that it particularly galvanized them, like some people say; but I also don’t think it did anything to remind him of his own mortality. To the contrary: he talked about his survival as if it were the will of God.

In February of 2001, the White House was shot at while Bush II was inside. Everything in the next seven years happened anyway. It doesn’t seem to have made him any more receptive to the will or displeasure of the people.

In 1994, something similar happened while Clinton was in the White House. He still served two terms, and not much seems to have changed about his demeanor or policies.

Ronald Reagan was shot at and hit in 1981, but it took the nuclear near miss in 1983 for him to de-escalate his rhetoric.

The attempted assassination of Nixon in February of 1974 doesn’t seem to have done anything to speed up his resignation that August.

For that matter, the successful assassination of JFK didn’t stop Johnson from handling Vietnam so poorly, and didn’t stop Nixon from being Nixon to begin with.

So I’m frankly doubtful that assassination attempts–successful or otherwise–are at all effective in giving politicians any feeling of mortality.