As someone currently living in Canada, the US is badly fucking up a lot of it’s international relations too. I’ve heard several people here say that even if if the US unfucks itself right away (which it won’t), it’s still going to be a long time before things will be right again.
You don’t go around threatening neighbours and allies like this and then expect to be able to just walk it back overnight.
“We gave him root access, then waited for about the amount of time it would take him to copy off everything he needs, then took it away again so its all good now.”
“Applicable” doing a lot of heavy lifting there
As a European living in Canada, it seems like outside of the States there’s a lot of talk about figuring out how to just carry on without America. And this is going to sound harsh, but TBH even when the US being more chill it’s still kind of a pain in the ass to other countries around the world. There’s always some war that they start and expect everyone else to get involved in or something like that, and for the last decade or so they’ve been flipping between sensible people and Trump every 4 years which makes the whole country wildly unpredictable to deal with. It’s hard to get any sort of international agreement going when it takes a year or two to negotiate, and you know it’s just going to get tossed out a couple of years later anyway.
Also, as a non-American if you complain about the president or say something like “You guys should vote for Harris” during an election, there’s always a swarm of Americans who show up and tell you to butt out and mind your own business, but they don’t seem to get that it is our business because when you elect someone like Trump it fucks up the world. I’m sitting here in Canada, wondering when the tariffs are going to kick in or if America is going to try an annex us, whether the US is going to start a war with the EU over Greenland, or if they’re going to seize the fucking Panama Canal in the next couple of years, which are all things that the president of the USA has openly talked about doing. Not to mention there’s an unelected ketamine-addicted billionaire Nazi running around installing servers in all the government offices with nobody stopping him, who’s also talking about overthrowing the UK government and trying to get the AfD elected in Germany, so who knows what that’s going to do around the world.
Just as a heads up, the Hitman trilogy is absurdly complicated to purchase for some unknown reason. I own the first two and I literally cannot work out how to buy the third one.
So tread carefully I guess lol.
Yeah as a non-American, it certainly does look from the outside as if a ketamine-fuelled Nazi is going around just taking over government offices largely unopposed.
Once you wrap your head around it, Rimworld is great for stuff like that. Once you start thinking outside the lines you can perform the most outrageous war crimes for literally no reason other than your own entertainment.
Like, if an enemy sends a raiding party you can nuke half the map with nerve gas to kill them, then skin them, eat them to keep the colony growing, then load all their skins into a pod and fire it back into the enemy base. The game doesn’t encourage you to do stuff like that, but it also doesn’t stop you lol.
Or you can use the skins to make hats and trench-coats.
I don’t know the name of it, but I really enjoy the sort of gameplay where you roll up to an enemy compound or something, and then you just sort of chip away at it and cause chaos until it all falls apart.
The sort of thing you’d do in Farcry, where you’d snipe some dudes, plant traps, shoot the tiger cage so the tiger would get out and eat people etc.
All the more reason this is going to get ugly, even when we wiped them off the planet it only took a century or so before they came back because people are mostly nasty idiots who don’t learn from history.
I suppose the revised plan is going to have to be to wipe them off the planet again and then make sure they stay scared forever.
I would make a very rare exception and pre-order only certain titles, like if there was a new Civ Game, cause I knew I was going to get it immediately anyway and sometimes they’d let you pre-load.
But with the new Civ being nearly $170 CAD for the full version, I’m not even doing that anymore. I look forward to the real Civ VII release date of sometime in the 2027 Steam Christmas sale lol.
Plus the two aren’t mutually exclusive. You could just as easily go to prison and then just be abandoned there once the climate becomes uninhabitable anyway. Wouldn’t be the first time:
Back in 2005, when Katrina hit New Orleans, prison guards abandoned prisoners in locked cells as the floodwaters rose chest-high. Several thousand of those inmates were eventually rescued, but then miserably housed on a broken piece of interstate, directly exposed to the Southern summer sun.
Ah okay, and don’t worry that’s not a spoiler or anything
Not sure how far you are through the Culture books yet, but: Musk thinks he is Zakalwe or something, but he’s really Veppers.
Yeah I agree, it’s just sort of how America is - naturally everything that happens there tends to spill over and have consequences around the world as well, so I’m not pretending it won’t affect me or anything like that. It’s more like… I don’t get a vote in America, and it’s not like I can reasonably change anything that’s happening there in any significant way.
But doomscrolling and arguing with random right-wing Americans isn’t helping anyone either, so I don’t really see what I can do other than save my energy and maybe try to not let it affect things too much on a more local scale wherever I can?
Yeah as a non-American I honestly just don’t have the energy to be worried/outraged about what’s going on in the US anymore. I’ve essentially been fretting about America since George W. Bush took office, and it just keeps getting worse. Now they’ve handed the presidency, house, senate, supreme court and the popular vote to Trump I just… don’t have it in me to engage in four more years of people endlessly tweeting about the horrible shit Trump is doing, while nobody does anything about it. Not to mention the decades afterwards it’ll take to clean this all up, if that’s even possible.
Sorry to all the Americans who didn’t vote for this. Good luck.
I think he’s just paying back favours TBH
Yeah I was saying that the other day, in Idiocracy they actually listened to the advice of the smart person and tried to improve things. We’re not even doing that lol
I’ve been saying for a while, George W. Bush is the one who took the door off its hinges and sold it, Trump is just the inevitable crackhead who walked in and started living in the kitchen.
Also as a non-American, I don’t get how this is even a close election? To me it seems like the options are Competent Politician Who You May Not Agree With On Everything vs. Actual Cabal Of Demented Fascists, and it seems like it could genuinely go either way.
Yeah even if they did actually repeal it, which they won’t, it’s really closing the stable door after the horse has bolted at this point IMO.
Because with the current administration, you can say it’s illegal to accept money from so-and-so, and they’ll just go “fuck you” and do it anyway and nobody will will stop them or bring consequences, so … yeah. This is kind of doing time, not talking time.