I wouldn’t bet my life, my safety, or my career on it.
Neither would I bet yours.
Look, even if we weren’t talking about fat old baby and his weekend warriors, the argument that we should discard democracy out of terror is coward talk.
Again, not that one would be betting their life, safety, or career at all. Trump does not, in fact, have the ability to teleport behind you when you say his name three times into a mirror.
I see where you made that argument, but I don’t see where I did.
And you keep coming back to Trump, while I keep coming back to a small fraction of his more rabid followers.
We disagree that any retaliation would be possible. Fair enough.
The thing about his rabid followers is they tend to be isolated to their location.
Plus, has the assassination of people who have irritated Trump become a thing while I wasn’t looking? Because that’s what you’re proposing here.
Nope. I don’t sleep well as it is, but this wouldn’t bother me. I’d have more trouble sleeping if I didn’t do it.
Again: that we disagree is plenty fair.
But there have been a horrible number of stories … just about journalists getting death threats/having to have private security … for what the perpetrators so frequently call “fake news” (and which virtually never is).
You give the bat-shit crazy supporters (to be fair, there are too many on either side of the spectrum) more credit than I do.
Whichever.
Personally, I’d okay with the mike activation/deactivation being on a timer. No human control, no special cases, no nothing. The moderator can always speak, but at any given time only one candidate can be heard by anyone, and who can talk is dictated by the clock.
I suppose you could run into problems if somebody pulls a gettysburg address and says a single sentence inside a ten minute time block, and in those cases it would be convenient if the moderator could execute an early abort, moving on to the next time block early. However if doing that risks encouraging crazed murderous maniacs to target the moderator then fine, I’m willing to let everyone sit in silence and run out the clock.
I don’t think this is that hard, turn all the cameras on the person who’s turn it is, he’ll hate Joe getting all the camera time, more than anything else. At the same time, turn the interrupter’s mic volume down, and turn the other volume up. No rule changes required.
Why can’t the moderator have a surprise tactic?
Or, Joe gets a subtitle type scroll so people can mute their tv and read what Joe is saying!
Or, Joe gets three flash cards that say pithy things, that he can hold up for the camera, for the duration of the interruption.
Give Biden and the other guy buttons they can push that will deliver a moderately uncomfortable electrical shock when activated. But pushing the button only shocks your opponent if the opponent’s microphone registers speech during a time it shouldn’t, otherwise the shock zaps the button pusher.
If you are going to do that, just get a chess clock tied to their mic.
Give each of them a bit less than half the allotted time, with a bit for the moderator.
When they are done speaking, they hit the button that turns off their own mic and timer, and turns on the other one’s.
Interruptions should sometimes be tolerated, so, during the periods that are not intended to be uninterrupted statements, but more in the back and forth session, a person can use their time to turn on their mic while the other person is talking, maybe at a 2x rate.
Once they are out of time, their mic is dead, and they will not be heard until they are given time for their closing statements.
Or, put each candidate over a dunk tank, and whenever one candidate interrupts the other, the interrupted candidate gets a ball.