If Trump didn’t have a playbook I wonder if he could have accomplished the same tyranny he has.

I’m in the US Virgin islands at the moment on a trip, and I had a good conversation with a taxi driver. Tourism is way down and they are all just as disgusted and feel just as helpless as the rest of us. It’s still a US territory, but anecdotally his shit is flinging on everyone.

There have been many horrible events, but recency bias, I would be interested in what if Hitler never came to power, there was no WWII, and no Holocaust. Would his failure to forge a path to power have prevented many of today’s happenings and not put the US as the top world power for decades, or would we still have ended up here? Israel and Palestine would likely be different, nukes wouldn’t have been dropped, and maybe the Soviet union wouldn’t have collapsed. I’m not a history guy, so maybe all of this is off base. Again, certainly worse things in history that if changed would have reshaped the world, but this is definitely not a small thing affecting us today.

I sure as shit wouldn’t be shooting children in the streets. Anywhere I guess, but also the streets. I’d rather take a bullet to the head denying an order instead of murdering an innocent.

She’s a right cunt.

Yes everyone. His personal banker, the janitor, house cleaning cleaning service, pool cleaners, all of them should be investigated. Many will be innocent if any wrong doing, but it’d be foolish to believe that none of them were aware.

So you’re just a racist. That explains everything.

Conservative politics always ends in a dog shit economy. Trump is currently top two worst world leaders for their country following only Putin.

I’ve never complained to get someone moved, but there are plenty of people that I didn’t/don’t like that I still have to work with. I will maintain a positive working relationship with those people by being nice.

I don’t don’t fit the mould of these ladies you’re talking about, but it could be a similar motive assuming they are aware that your are aware that they are the reason you moved. If they don’t know that, sometimes distance can help make bad relationships amicable. Again anecdotally, I’ve worked with people who’s work I don’t approve of, but they are fine people. Not working directly with them allows me to enjoy time with them.

Without the context omitted for why they complained about you, we can’t really offer fair judgement. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, you can see my above for possible explanations.

That must be one helluva water source to get it to cross fork tines.

I work next to a former pastor. He’s the most based religious person that I’ve met, and he’s imo what Christianity should be about. His big thing is your relationship with God is between you and him. This guy isn’t here to judge, and knows that it’s not his place. He mostly believes that if you’re a good person you’ll get to heaven.

I don’t agree with his religious views, but we can comfortably discuss philosophically about religion. More Christians should be like him and not like the fanatics and hypocrites.

Tell them you stopped believing in ghosts when you were a child. If coincidentally, the Christian God is real and all those other dieties aren’t, he’s a real fuck face. Why would anyone want to follow a supposedly all powerful being that gives children cancer instead of not being a piece of shit? If I die and go to Hell, at least I’ll be spending time with the one angel that fell because he loved me too much. It’s these old Christians that explained what Hell is like, and they had a pretty strong bias when writing it out. Why should anyone take their words with any value?

God’s either fake or a dog shit entity, so either way I have no interest in giving him any sort of praise.

You didn’t miss a step, Trump and his cronies skipped the whole deplomacy step.

True, but the whole process can throw wrenches into Russia’s invasion and maybe be a catalyst to get other countries to step up their support as well. The US isn’t the only Western country doing wrong by Ukraine.

At the very least, this publicly puts pressure on Russia. Zelensky can’t just wish the war away or tell Trump what to do, but he can play his best hand.

Let’s say that some papers do get signed and and it makes Russia have to pivot or draws in more support from NATO. Maybe a couple months later Trump roles back those protections. That’s a couple of months closer to Trump’s exit and the hope for a better future system. He’s hopefully lived to fight another day. At worst, talks devolve and the status quo remains the same.

Admittedly it’s worked fine for me, and this is my only use for it, but they were bought out by a company with history if malware based ad injection. PIA still maintains no logging and since they can’t really feed ads to my torrents, it probably doesn’t matter. I’ve known this for years and still haven’t switched, but it wouldn’t be my first choice for a VPN I use for web browsing or other online activities.

I have qbittorrent and PIA VPN. I need to switch VPN providers but that’s a separate topic. Qbt is on a kill switch so if the VPN goes down, no torrents flow. I’ve never received a letter when running VPN but have a few times in the past when not.

I have a Plex library over 40TB in size, and the vast majority has been torrents. I love in the US for geographical context. If you also are in the States, a simple VPN will be enough.

She was released and had stories of abuse/torture while in captivity.

Anecdotally, my closest friends are all senior level tech workers who are fully aware of what reddit did and the current state of everything, but I’m the only person that’s left for Lemmy. They are all still regulars on Reddit. In the same vein, I’ve written off doing business with many companies due to their shitty practice. Other than my sister also dropping Target, I’m the only person that I know that has stopped giving business to shit companies.

So yea, unfortunately the reality is that the vast vast majority of people just don’t care enough change even the smallest of behaviours for ethical reasons. I mentioned something today at my family Christmas that I don’t buy Reign energy drinks anymore because I stopped buying PepsiCo after they rolled back DEI. The response was, “get over yourself”. That’s probably the above average response for most people I know.

Yea, I try to not go down that path if available, but just tonight for example we were talking about an athlete who I lost respect for due to their not getting the covid vaccine when it was mandatory. I expressed that given the timing, I can empathize to an extent, but at a certain point, this person just ignored any procedure and didn’t work for an alternative, which there were paths for. In reality, it shouldn’t be a political opinion, but vaccines have become political.

I generally try not to engage in political discussion in person otherwise, but if I get pulled into it, I’m not in the habit of letting bigots speak without pushback, regardless of my relationship (boss, subordinate for example) to that person or persons. Silence is complacency. I try not to stir the pot, I’m not going to keep quiet just to not insult someone’s opinions, but I do try to speak in a respectful manner for the sake of conversation rather than debate.

90+% of the time it’s a non issue because I try to take steps to not be belligerent, and often times that leads to some level of constructive conversation or it just pivots to something else and we all move on amicably.