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.

Yes. It’s ONLY supposed to be used when you find yourself leaping from life to life. Striving to put right what once went wrong. And hoping each time that your next leap will be the leap home.

I don’t make the rules. I just enforce them.

Similarly related, I remember reading The Hunt for Red October and enjoying it. But I can’t decide if I actually enjoyed it, or if I’m transposing a memory from my enjoyment of the film to my enjoyment of the book. I’m afraid to re-read it and find out, because I haven’t been a fan of much else that he’s written so I suspect I know the answer.

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

Up here during COVID, a lot of grocery stores implemented arrows and traffic directions in their aisles so that no one aisle was two way. They basically became one way streets.

I desperately hoped that they would keep that, but nope. Quickly returned to the old jack-assery.

Can I just copy and paste this as my answer?

You think I have that much time in my life to list all of them!?

The one that pops into my head immediately is:

There is a special place in hell for people who don’t hug the curb when yielding to traffic before making a right hand turn. Instead they take up the half the through lane and half the turning lane, meaning that the person behind them can’t pull forward.

Onions

What puts me in awe of things like flight isn’t the act itself, but the brilliance of the people who designed it to work. I look at the aerodynamic shape of an airfoil and think “we did that…humans”.

I don’t necessarily disagree. But I don’t exactly consider Latintimes as mainstream news. They have a decided lean to the left and are publishing a story that points to something they want to say. No different than when a conservative right leaning website with a name like “Patriot Page”, or “Freedom Force” or some other creepy MAGA bullshit name does the same thing.

There are main stream outlets, and then there are outlets that we can all tell, mostly from their content, don’t bother to hide their bent left or right.

This isn’t like CNN or CBS or BBC are broadcasting it. (Cue somebody linking to exactly that…making me look like an idiot.) Heck, AFAIK, even Fox News and MSNBC, the two “main stream media” sources that I would consider least biased in both directions, aren’t touching it as a story.

And why they seem to selectively think sexism is bad while denying women education

That’s not what they’re saying. They’re mocking American hypocrisy.

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.