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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Biden is old, his speech and stance and movement shows it much more than Trump does, and it's basically negligent for democrats to not replace him, or have already replaced him. With that said - Biden did not sound anywhere this bad a few months* ago, or a few weeks ago. If he had, "we" would have noticed when reporters asked Biden a few questions , like we noticed in the first minutes of the debate. Yes, he's mostly repeating prepared remarks in those videos, but he was doing plenty of that during the debate, and he was not any better while doing so. I believe claims that he was sick, and that fucked up his voice and otherwise degraded his performance, being sick often does really lower one's capabilities. It's still objectively bad that he's old enough being sick brings him down here, but this is not a median Biden performance.

* - this is the source of the 'president of mexico, sisi' quote. But people fuck up important words sometimes. I did so twice today. One of the CNN hosts did so too.

Again he should still pull out, but people are swinging too far with the crowd on their assessments of the facts.

The question is if they have given a dementia patient the nuclear codes. Either they have taken the nukes away from the president which means the president isn't actually in charge or a dementia patient is controlling the nukes. Both are bad options.

I'd be more worried about a dementia patient failing to launch nukes than doing so accidentally. People with dementia act bizarrely but not randomly.

Do you think the president was literally controlling the nukes before?

Eisenhower probably had a great deal of personal power over them. It has probably declined since then.

Eisenhower probably had a lot of personal power in that if he deliberately ordered the nukes launched, they'd be launched. But there were still a lot of other people in the chain, from him to the top brass to the commanders at the silos to the actual key-turners. There's pretty much no way he could have had a "senior moment" and launched the nukes. Same goes for Biden.