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.

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.

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 can imagine it must be incredibly annoying for Boris to be automatically fact-checked every time they say something stupid.

I want to believe its all fake news by Dems in order to keep their base from becoming complacent and the actual reality is that polls are showing that they’re beating Orange Mussolini like a rented mule.

I literally couldn’t tell. Which is why I just Homered back into the bush rather than attempting to even reply. If it’s satire, it’s master class.

How have we arrived in a world where a grandpa can’t tell a corny grandpa joke anymore.

Next you’re going to term me that pretending to take your kids nose is akin to threatening torture under the Geneva convention…

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”.

Because people are dumb. And I don’t mean that in some flippant, off-hand, snarky way. I mean that in all dead seriousness. People are dumb.

The truest line ever written was from Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black.

“A person is smart. But people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.” The novelization of the film actually takes it a bit further and adds “A mob is only as smart as it’s dumbest member.”

Long story short, group-think skews towards the simplistic and instinctual. This election is close for the same reason that one scared cow will turn into a stampede even though the rest of them have no idea what they’re running from…because we’re wired to see that if other people are running, maybe we should be too…it’s a matter of survival.

A smart person can see past that and resist when they’re alone. But get them into a crowd of like minded individuals and we aren’t smart anymore. And people like Trump take advantage of that.

What is that, about tree-fiddy American?

My opinion of Musk has nothing to do with it. For the price of it, its ugly as fuck.

I’m not a fan of priuses either, but priuses don’t a) take wild swings in design in order to be “edgy” and b) price themselves according to supposed “cool points”.

With or without Musk, your choices reflect who you are. This guy bought an overpriced vehicle in order to be “cool” and now he’s butt hurt that no one agrees with him.

…pursue acquiring that family

That’s just such a weird creepy incel way to word that…

If Simon Whistler can host a thousand youtube channels and a new podcast every day of the week with just a handful of staff, freelance writers, and a couple of editors…

The unsealed documents make it clear that lawyers by and large were telling him over and over again in 2020 that the election was not stolen. My hope is that lawyers, I’m assuming most of whom have read those documents, tell him to pound sand when he approaches them this time around and as a result the loser just ends up shouting into the wind.