WatDabney

It’s not a coincidence that I call the government this coup is clearly intended to establish a “plutocratic/christofascist autocracy.”

I have no doubt that many in the Heritage Foundation are sincere in their christofascism, but I also have no doubt that the corporations and billionaires who are bankrolling the whole thing (not just the HF, but Trump, the corrupt supreme court, the complicit media and so on) care little to nothing about all of that. They understand both the popular appeal of religious fundamentalism and the avenues of control it provides, but their goal is much simpler - to gain as much authority as possible so that they’ll be free to rob and plunder without the risk of facing an empowered and angry electorate.

The christofascists are definitely a threat, but in the wider scheme of things, they’re just tools.

I know it’s a tired cliche, but I wish I had more upvotes to give you.

I didn’t want to go into any details, partly because I was counting on people who had gone through the same thing to just get it, but mostly because it would take at least a couple of paragraphs to even scratch the surface of the whole complex issue, and that wasn’t directly relevant at the time.

And you nailed it.

I clearly remember - the worst part of the whole ordeal wasn’t the times when he refused to face the fact that his faculties had diminished to the point that he could no longer drive safely - that was just frustrating. The worst part was the look of fear and dejection he’d get when he’d let down his guard enough to actually face that fact - those times when I could see that he fully understood and really agreed, and it crushed him.

So… yeah.

He opened his mouth and words came out. Some number of them were falsehoods, inevitably.

At this point, my working theory is that a crucial aspect ofTrump is that he actually has little to no understanding of the distinction between truth and falsehood.

It’s not really that he “lies,” since that’s a volitional act - it implies a conscious awareness of the truth and a conscious decision to claim something else. Rather it’s that he simply says whatever he thinks will serve his purposes at the moment, and that it’s not even that he doesn’t value the truth when he does, but that the whole idea of truth just doesn’t even enter into it. As if he genuinely doesn’t even grasp the concept.

That explains an aspect of Trump I’ve never understood - he’s obviously extremely charismatic and convincing - people want to believe what he says. That stands in sharp contrast to the fact that, personally, he’s some grotesque combination of cartoonish and repulsive. He’s really, no matter how you look at him, foul on a very personal and immediate level - a gross, pale, flabby, oily, overly made up lump who looks (and notoriously smells) like what you’d get if a life-size drain clog got up and started walking around.

So how is he so charismatic?

I think it’s because no matter what he says or to whom, he’s entirely 100% sincere. In spite of knowing full well that he lies constantly, people, when talking to him, just find themselves believing everything he says, because he radiates sincerity. He doesn’t exhibit even the slightest trace of even the subtlest of hints that he’s not telling the truth because his brain isn’t even able to make that distinction. The entire mechanism by which humans recognize and distinguish between truth and falsehood, is, in his brain, so broken that it effectively doesn’t exist at all. So it’s not even that he projects unwarranted sincerity alongside his falsehoods, but that he projects the exact same sincerity that anyone else could only entirely effectively attach to what they deeply believed to be completely true to literally every single thing that falls out of his mouth, and not consciously or deliberately, but simply because his brain is broken in such a way that his sincere belief in whatever is falling out of his mouth at the moment is entirely divorced from its truth value.

Ah… yes. That tracks.

That really, seriously - not as just a bit of partisan mudslinging but as an observation of a verifiable reality - has become the Republican strategy to win elections.

If they had any integrity at all, they’d take election losses as evidence that they need to change their platforms enough to appeal to more people.

But since they have no integrity at all, they take election losses to mean that they have to do whatever they can, fair or foul, to disenfranchise people who would vote against them.

He’s lied about money so many times that even after losing a high profile court case over it, and even in a situation in which people are going to instantly know it’s a lie since the teleprompter is right there, he still can’t stop himself.

I’m willing to bet that he isn’t even aware of it - that the whole concept of truth and falsehood is completely alien to him.

Why on earth would voters want to repeal ranked-choice voting?

I don’t doubt that politicians, party officials and donors would want it repealed - it’d threaten their comfortably corrupt system. But I can’t see any reason why voters would.

This reeks of fraud.

I know it’s sort of trite, but every time I see one of these stories, it reminds me of how difficult it was to convince my dad to stop driving.

I’m an American, so yes - in a heartbeat.

Broadly, I wouldnt much care where it was, just so long as it was somewhere that was not being actively transfomed into a plutocratic/christofascist autocracy.

And in fact, there’s virtually nothing that I want more at this point in time than to get the hell out while I can. I fully expect that if I don’t, I’m going to end up in prison or dead, just like so many other vocal dissidents under so many other authoritarian regimes.

Well yeah - that too.

Beyond that though, her eyes genuinely creep me out.

It’s a fairly common literary trope, but I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen such blatant malice and unmitigated evil in an actual person’s eyes before.

It (Israel) submitted written comments, saying that the questions put to the court were prejudiced and “fail to… acknowledge Israel-Palestinian agreements to negotiate issues, including “the permanent status of the territory, security arrangements, settlements, and borders”.

Imagine how brazenly dishonest one would have to be to actually, unironically try to condemn an international body for supposedly “fail(ing) to acknowledge Israel-Palestinian agreements to negotiate issues” when the specific matter at hand is ones ongoing policy of coming onto land that’s clearly desgnated as Palestinian territory, throwing the residents off (and killing them if they dare to resist), then building an Israeli-only settlement on the Palestinan land you’ve just forcibly occupied.