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.

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.

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.

apoplectic

Legitimately one of my favourite words.

I used the phrase “tilting at windmills” when discussing current politics and got looked at like an insane person.

No one reads anymore, apparently.

A largely forgotten show from the late 90s called “Seven Days”.

Josie and the Pussycats was lampooning our current celebrity obsessed, “influencer” obsessed, consumer lifestyle 20 years ago. Yes, there was certainly celebrity worship back then. But the way the movie portrayed it and the consumer greed that seeks to profit from it feels even more relevant today.

Eight decades later, and all those lessons have been forgotten. Self-interested and shortsighted leaders have risen to the tops of many nations, and nationalistic rhetoric is gaining popularity again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory

In some ways, I’m a believer in the “80 year cycle, theory”. But to me, it’s a much simpler cause. 80 years is going to be roughly four generations removed from whatever the last chaos was (in this case, Hitler and Fascism and the Holocaust).

The generation that lived through it is long dead. They taught their children (My parents) to never forget. They in turn taught their children (Me…Gex X) to still remember what was fought for. And then the current generation (my kids if I had any) have a far less fundamental grasp on that history. We’re so far removed from that event that it’s been forgotten just long enough that it all makes an appearance again for the very same reasons. Because it’s an easy trap to fall into; blaming someone else for your problems.

All this has happened before and it will happen again. It’s as simple as “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it”.

What is that, about tree-fiddy American?

Best decision my (now ex) wife and I ever made. Not because we are divorced now. But because

a) I’m free to live my own life. and

b) Even back when kids was an option, she and I both kind of saw the world that was coming and decided that we didn’t want to subject our children or grandchildren to the world that was turning to shit.

Looking around today, I feel absolutely vindicated for taking that stance back in the early 2000’s when I was married.

I wouldn’t call this “inconsequential”, but not only is Deckard a Replicant, he’s a very specific Replicant.

Gaff (played by Eddie Olmos) was the original officer assigned to hunting down the escaped replicants, before Holden and before Deckard. When the escaped Androids originally tried to storm the Tyrell corporation, one of them got “fried” going through an electric fence. And it was either there, or in another encounter, that Gaff was wounded in the leg, forcing Holden to take over the case, and we know where that ended up…

I posit that the android that got “fried”, didn’t actually get fried. In concert with the Tyrell corporation, they programmed him with Gaff’s memories in order to finish the job, which is why Gaff is chaperoning him, driving him around; to make sure the memory implant holds. It’s why Gaff seems to know what he’s thinking and can make origami to give him hints. It’s why Gaff at the end of the movie says “You’ve done a man’s work”. And it’s why Gaff is such a dick to him. Imagine chaperoning your artificial replacement around that everyone thinks can do just as good a job as you…

I always watch Blade Runner from that perspective. At least until the sequel came out and ruined it for me.

No. It’s called the Paradox of Tolerance. “Discussing” rationally with the intolerant only serves to justify their position in their own eyes and thereby embolden them.

In other words, putting up with them simply gives them more ink

Turning the other cheek only works if the person doing the slapping has a sense of shame. Trump and his ilk have long since proven they have none.

Logic does not rely on assumptions. It relies on making deductions about what is probable when faced with the current knowledge.

I see what you are meaning, but it’s a misunderstanding of how the scientific method works. Base Assumptions never come into play.

The hypothesis comes from the existing evidence, not the other way around.

For example, Eratosthenes didn’t have an “assumption” that the earth was round and then said, “hmmm…how shall we test this?” Rather, he had heard from someone or other that at noon is a certain city, there was no shadow. While in another city, there was a shadow being cast by objects. He started to logically deduce why that could be. He had his evidence, that in one city to the south, no shadow, and in another city, a shadow of 7 degrees at the same time of day. He knew the distance between the two cities and deduced not only that the earth was round, but it’s size as well.

No gut assumptions necessary.

No downvote. I 100% agree.

Science is not a “belief”. It’s a “deduction”

One is based on logic. The other is based on gut feeling emotion.

edited: I feel like emotion is a better contrast in my analogy.