WatDabney

The really disturbing part is that he's technically correct.

At this point in history, supporting democracy really is a partisan position, since the Republicans uniformly and adamantly oppose it, and intend to impose christofascist autocracy in its place.

Fight the urge to immediately get off the train.

Even with as many episodes of Star Trek as I've seen, I'm sure I'd want to rush right out and start exploring.

No shit?

They didn't buy Trump for no reason

It's a hosting site for free ebooks.

The site admins don't provide any of the ebooks themselves - they just host files that are uploaded by whoever wishes, and provide for downloads for whoever wishes. (Not that that alters its legal status - just by way of explanation).

It's notably popular among college students, as a source to download free versions of obscenely overpriced textbooks.

And this neatly illustrates the grotesquely destructive delusion that lies at the heart of religious fundamentalism - it's ultimately, and I'm tempted to say without exception, an attempt by overtly evil people to place the blame for their evil on others, or on society as a whole.

The underlying issue is not that other people feel lust, for instance, but that they themselves feel lust, and they consider that to be so shameful that their self-images cannot tolerate the idea that it's a part of their own makeup. It must and can only be, to them, a thing that's been imposed on them by "evil" people or an "evil" society, so the solution, to them, is to stamp out that "evil." Solely in the belief, ultimately, that if that "evil" could somehow be made to not exist, it would no longer plague them.

Ah...

Yes - now it all fits together.

I remember those days, but I wasn't on Reddit then.

And I agree on both counts.

The point isn't whether it works or not - the point is why it comes to be in the first place - why and how people reach a point at which they embrace it.

And that's when they come to see that their government is failing them - most often, when it's serving its own interests and the interests of a wealthy few rather than the interests of the people at large.

And here's a tip - you can't combat it by deriding the people who embrace it. If anything, that just makes them double down on it, since, to them, that's just further evidence that you're an elitist piece of shit who doesn't care about them or their needs, so they're going to turn to these other people over here who (say they) do.

Again, there's one and only one way to counter populism - governmental reform. The problem is that people see that the government isn't doing enough to serve their needs. The solution is for the government to do more to serve their needs.

Populism is a reactionary movement. It doesn't just spring up out of nowhere - it comes to be specifically if and when there's a relatively common perception among the people that the government no longer serves their interests.

The solution then is simple and straightforward, at least in principle - all it takes is for the government to institute the necessary reforms to win back the trust and support of the people.

The problem comes because all too many politicians don't have the necessary empathy, integrity and/or determination to actually do that.

So they have nobody to blame but themselves.

So... the candidate who has repeatedly publicly stated that if elected he fully intends to be a dictator claims to have nothing to do with a roadmap to dictatorship written by his ex-staffers...

Riiight.

This is another of the things that astonishes me about Trump - not only is he a grotesque buffoon in clown makeup and a ludicrous combover who notoriously smells like ass and a staggeringly delusional lunatic who clearly lives in some sort of fantasy world - he's a transparent, egregious and laughably poor compulsive liar. He can barely complete a sentence without lying (well - he can barely complete a sentence at all, but you know what I mean).

I swear that if he was magically transferred directly into a movie script, the character would be rejected as too over-the-top to be believable. And yet here we are...

Hasn't r/canada notoriously been a mod-dictatorship shithole for years now?

I never spent any notable time there, but I remember seeing meta-conflicts there spill out onto the front page on a pretty regular basis.

It doesn't matter how many times I see Boebert in the news - she still seems to me to be a particularly gross and nasty tweaked-out cam girl who's inexplicably been allowed to pretend to be a politician.