I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t they have at least TRIED to make it sound like DONALD TRUMP, who makes PERFECT tweets, instead of Something that Biden (very crooked and UNFAIR!) would write? SAD!
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The Koch organization said it was sitting out this presidential election, and yet, Project 2025 is just crawling with people plugged into the Koch network. 
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You mean the Koch network has been lying about their distaste of Trump and Trumpism?!? /s
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Axios – Trump disavows Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, despite MAGA ties
Why do people trust this man?
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I don’t think anyone here does… His followers trust no one BUT him…
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This. This substack.
This was life under Nursultan Nazarbaev. This was life under Putin. This was life under Leonid Kuchma. This was life under Askar Akayev. This was life under Islam Karimov, oh lord was it life under Islam Karimov. This was life under King Abdullah II. This was life under Charles Taylor, whose tenure made Karimov look like a saint.
I could add a few other countries that weren’t quite strongman dictatorships but were full fledged police states.
And it was worse than he described in many ways, for in addition to financial and political corruption, there is also moral and ethical corruption, such sexual favors demanded for passing grades, or to process important documents such as mortgages, or to be considered for a job.
I’ve lived this. We do not want this, and the people cheering this on have absolutely no clue how fucking awful bad it will become so unbelievably quick.
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It just struck me that the biggest thing to be aware of is High Trust vs Low Trust societies.
A High Trust Society is one where you can basically trust that the other person is basically trustworthy. It’s the sort of society where business deals work smoothly because everyone is probably honest, and anyone who isn’t honest will be punished and their victims recompensed.
A Low Trust Society is one where who you know is vitally important, which relies on complex networks of favours and bribery, where nobody can really trust anybody and everybody is trying to screw everybody else pretty much all of the time because that’s the only way you can survive.
A Strongman Rule is the almost Platonic ideal of a Low Trust society. The Strongman does not, almost by definition, trust the population — otherwise he wouldn’t need to be a Strongman. And if he doesn’t trust the population, then they can’t trust him to act in their best interest. They have no protection from him, and he won’t give any protection from each other. The only way to survive is to get the authorities on side, and the only way to do that is illegally, and so everyone is trapped in a web of lies and favours and deals and bribes, and everyone is at risk of being discovered or reported at any time. The more authoritarian the society, the less that trust is possible.
And that’s expensive. Because free business relies on high trust: it helps mutually beneficial deals, it removes overhead, and smooths out the need to get the lawyers on every detail, with the threat of suing for the slightest inconvenience.
And it strikes me that in the US especially, many many people won’t see what’s so bad about that, because you’ve been living in a Low Trust Society your whole lives, not knowing anything else except as fairy stories and legends, which are hiding behind words like “socialism”.
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It’s the country where there are actual cards to show that you have connections.
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It’s much worse than that. We actually live in a High Trust Society that aspires to be a Low Trust Society. So much of our mythology is wrapped around variations of the rugged individualist and the Protestant Work Ethic that the stories we tell ourselves lionize that over the vast majority of regular people working together, doing kindnesses to strangers, and generally being trustworthy.
In the major metropolitan area I live, 94% of found wallets or purses in these studies are returned.
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Can attest. Years ago, we found a cigar box-type container in the mall parking lot that had over $700. We tried to turn it in to the Lost & Found, but they refused to take it. Assumed that it was from some fundraiser, but they wouldn’t tell us who had been doing things like that. Finally asked what we should do with it, and, after getting the “what are you, stupid?” eyeball, we were told to keep it and move along. We are in a semi-rural, very red area where the “rugged individual” mythology thrives. We donated it to the church foodbank. Never did hear about any missing money, though.
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