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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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”.

Plasma:

“Here’s literally all the things… You sort it out, if you want. If not…whatever.”

Quebec cares. Probably a little too dogmatically in my opinion. But you’re right about east coast culture.

Although I would say that it does have it’s own somewhat well-documented cultural artifacts in terms of music, food and drink. We certainly hear more on the prairies about Screech, Great Big Sea and kissing the fish (for example) than most other areas with the exception of Quebec.

What is that, about tree-fiddy American?

Reagan and “trickle down economics” ushered in the 80s and poured gasoline onto Wall Street, empowering a thousand Gordon Geckos to abandon the middle class workers in the name of greater profit.

In Russia, Linux forks you!

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.

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.

Or maybe, just maybe, Europe has been around for soooo much longer than America that they’ve reached the age where they realize that there are other priorities in life than just the accumulation of wealth. Like enjoying life, having a work/life balance, socializing with one’s friends and family.

Perpsectives change when your history as a country is longer than a few hundred years.

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.