I don’t disagree, but that’s not really my point.

What you’re arguing is basically akin to people who sat out the vote because “Genocide Joe”. Which is what gave America Trump 2.0 in the first place. Yes, the established Military Complex is flawed and in some cases downright evil. But the response to that isn’t “fuck it, let’s burn it down and give a fucking toddler direct control of it.”

You don’t fix things by picking the worse option on purpose. That’s utter lunacy.

The US can not be trusted with its own military.

I’m not a fan of U.S. foreign policy. But as far as the military chain of command, it’s specifically designed to have it’s own checks and balances against abuse of power. Precisely what Trump is wanting to topple. So if the choice is an orange toddler or a robust and effective circle of generals, I’ll go with the generals thanks.

Would you care to cite some specific examples that you didn’t just repeat off of your uncle’s Facebook wall?

I’m thinking of dropping social media for the next six months because there’s a lot of shit going on that I have no control over and I can’t change.

That was pretty much my exact thought. I still log in (obviously). But I used to doom-watch the news after work leading up to the election. And for the last couple of nights I’ve been watching reruns of Quantum Leap on Pluto TV instead.

Feels good.

Because it’s only “alleged”.

Imagine if you’ve been alleged to be a pedo. It’s not proven. There’s not enough evidence. And it’s very possible that you’re not a pedo. But then someone “leaks” that allegation to your neigbours…how would you feel.

If there’s proof, absolutely release the names. If it’s just “alleged”, don’t fuck up a stranger’s life for nothing.

less internal European cooperation and a further move toward sovereign nation states

I call dibs on being assassinated in Kosovo this time around.

I live in Saskatchewan and I was just talking to a “right wing” friend of mine about this very issue. I had gone on a diatribe about right-wing conservatives in the US and she was getting a little upset thinking I was upset with her as a “Canadian right-winger”. So I pointed out to her that she isn’t actually “right-wing”. In fact very few people in Canada except for some nut-jobs who want to bring Trumpism to Canada are right-wing as the U.S. would describe it.

Our typical right-winger, including some very good friends of mine, are conservative, but not anti-abortion, hand-maid’s tale, anti-immigrant conservatives. Our right-wing would be considered liberal to the United States and the only reason most people here think they have to defend Trump is because they nominally share the adjective of “conservative” even though they’re VASTLY different levels of right-wing.

They’re innundated with American news 24-7 and don’t make any distinction between what they believe and what MAGA believes, but when you ask them specificially what they believe in, it’s far far far closer to an American’s concept of liberalism than of MAGA.

First choice would be a nordic country. They generally rank high up in metrics like health, happiness, etc…

Close second behind those would be New Zealand.

I couldn’t remember which general it was, so I had to swallow my pride and ask ChatGPT.

The general who famously called for documentation of concentration camps during their liberation was General Dwight D. Eisenhower. When U.S. forces liberated the Ohrdruf concentration camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald, on April 4, 1945, Eisenhower recognized the significance of documenting the atrocities. He anticipated that future generations might doubt the extent of Nazi crimes, so he ordered extensive photographic and film documentation of the camp’s conditions.

Eisenhower even invited journalists and members of Congress to visit the camps to ensure that eyewitness accounts would back up the documentation. He felt it was crucial to make the evidence indisputable, as he feared that without such documentation, people might one day deny or downplay the horrors of the Holocaust.

neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet

I would agree with that. But in all of their defence I’d add that they’re not trying to be. They are their own pieces of kit with their own roadmaps and goals.

The biggest frustration people from Photoshop have is that the expect Gimp or Krita to be a clone of Photoshop with feature to feature parity, and that’s never been the goal of either program.

Photoshop has spent decades basically merging the features of most of their products, so that it’s now basically a photo editor with features of Illustrator and a suite of advanced drawing tools. The only replacement for that would be a hypothetical program that combines Gimp, Krita & Inkscape. But that’s never been the goal of any of those programs. They’re separate kit and as far as I’m aware always will be.

Inkscape: Completely capable. I know many people who have used it instead of illustrator professionally for years.

GIMP: Depends on you. As someone who learned GIMP long before ever learning Photoshop, I find Photoshop unintuitive and frankly stupid. So it’s all about what you learned on. But GIMP relies on spending a few minutes setting it up for your own use case. Literally every window can be moved to anywhere. You can have whatever windows you want open all the time, or hidden behind right clicks, etc… Your tabs and tab groups are completely customizable to how you want to work. BUT the rub is that you have to be interested in doing that. GIMP is trashed for having a bad default UI because the expectation is that it doesn’t have a default UI. My GIMP would look entirely different from someone elses because I use different tools that I want front and centre than someone else might. If you’re not interested in that and just want something that you can learn a “default” setup and go with it (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that) than you’re better off sticking with Photoshop.

As for Krita, whatever else people are telling you, Krita is NOT a replacement for GIMP if you’re doing design work. What it brings to the table in terms of having built in Vector capabilities it negates by having a very limited and basic suite of selection tools. Something that would take you two seconds in PS or Gimp to band select, paint the foreground, feather the selection, shrink it, etc… takes five extra steps in Krita because Krita is a drawing program not a graphic design program; what few “advanced” selection tools they’ve introduced is tacked on and hidden between three or four extra steps because it just wasn’t designed to have them at first and they were added later.

Just because it looks nicer out of the box than Gimp, doesn’t make it better. I’ve tried replacing Gimp with Krita because i like the KDE suite of apps in general. But I was pulling my hair out trying to do even a basic composition using it’s archaic selection tools.

NATO will be fine. They’ll just have to up their game a bit militarily. If America wants to be insular and wrap a flag of isolationism around them, it’ll hurt in the short term, but after four years of being more independent of Americas tit, its more than likely the US that will find itself less relevant globally.

Even before this, there was already rumblings, not just in China, but elsewhere, about ditching the american dollar standard and returning to the gold standard. That’s just going to gain momentum as soon as Trump starts trying to wave his mushroom around.

They don’t. It was never their country to begin with, clearly.

The majority of the U.S. has been racist, bigoted, misogynists from the beginning. Hell, the entire electoral college system that just fucked everyone over is a compromise that was put into place because a bunch of rich white landowners in the Antebellum south couldn’t stand the idea of freed black men’s votes having as much power as theirs. So they immediately rigged the system to keep them in control of who gets power because you better believe no black man was ever going to be an elector.

That is who your country is. There was a brief period from the 60s to the 80s where it became declasse to be an asshole, and so they mostly shut up during that time when they were in public, and then went home and took out their frustration by beating their wives and kids.

Then along came the modern republican party, who began to tear down that cloak of respectability, and it emboldened all of those wife beating shit-heads to say “Hey…we can be assholes again…go us.”

This is your America. It always has been. I’m sorry if that hurts. I really am. But right now I’m also goddamned angry at your country on behalf of my country and all the others that have to be caught in the blast.

Somewhere in the long line of military people and internal operatives who condemned him, someone…somewhere, will take the first opportunity to Kennedy his orange ass.

There’s no way a man this hated, in a country as divided as the US, lasts a full four years.

Literally everything.

Maybe I’m just used to my comfortable parliamentary democracy.

You vote for your representative. Whichever party gets the most representatives gets power. It’s either a majority (meaning that they can do whatever they want because they got more representatives than all the other parties combined) or it’s a minority (meaning that to pursue their agenda they’ll need to cooperate and negotiate with the other parties because they don’t have enough representatives to do it themselves)

The leader of that ruling party becomes Prime Minister. He holds less power than a president because in reality he’s just the Prime Minister (First Minister among many) but he has more authority than the leaders of the other parties who didn’t win.

It just seems so simple compared to the lunacy to my south.

Exactly. There’s a very clear correlation between when Trump’s support started to fade and when Harris metaphorically pants him at the debate by daring to laugh at him when he talked about Haitians and made him look like an utter jackass.

Trumps followers are bullies, and they follow a lead bully. When that lead bully gets a taste of his own medicine, their supporters grow unsure of their allegiance.

It’s all highschool bullshit with Trump and MAGA.

It’s some crazy third-world-country shit that in the United States of America, you’ve almost reached the point of needing to declare martial law during an election period in order to ensure no one gets hurt.

Want has nothing to do with it. He doesn’t care. Winning the vote is, and always has been, his plan B. Plan A, as far as he’s concerned, is still chugging along without a hitch. Speaker of the House refuses to certify the count, goes all the way up to the supreme court, Supreme Court installs him.

He has literally no other plan than that.

It’s utterly repulsive to me that, regardless of the elections outcome, this walking shit stain is getting Secret Service protection paid for by the tax payers.

I’m not American, but I feel for you all. As far as I’m concerned, it should be like Witness Protection; if you commit a crime (or are in others ways a total piece of shit) while protected, that protection can and will be removed like they did with Henry Hill when he kept committing crimes.

I love my Canyon. But it hasn’t helped me with the ladies…