I think I figured out one reason Trump is going after Greenland. It looks huge on a Mercator Projection map even though it isn’t that large.
There is one and only one reason Trump/US wants Greenland. With US out of NATO, it is a point closer to Europe to threaten Europe. Every other explanation is a disgusting lie, and of zero value to US.
It wouldn’t be very strategically important to the US on its own, but it currently is strategically important to NATO and harmful to Russia.
Getting NATO out of Greenland is Putin’s order.
Absolutely absurdity that has to stop. Greenland is far away from Russia. Fine, some possible ICBM missile trajectories go over Greenland, but NATO is not going to stop US from putting missile shield or offensive nukes in Greenland, as long as it stays under NATO oversight. The Putin Derangement Syndrome that extends to explaining all Trump actions as gifts to Russia needs to stop being said out loud. Pure CIA disinformation to somehow brainwash Europe into accepting this.
BlueAnon conspiracy theorists continue to only be able to respond to bad things Americans do by saying “this is secretly the work of a foreigner”
With US out of NATO, it is a point closer to Europe to threaten Europe.
The US has Britain, which is essentially a US client state these days.
UK is indeed “close” to US. Unequal relationship where US keeps dangling free trade deal, but never delivers, no matter how many pipelines Liz Truss helps blow up. It is more of a close political relationship, rather than UK people desperate to follow every war. Musk threatening to liberate UK from liberals they voted for last, is a strain on public opinion. US using Greenland to threaten EU would lose US’s shine as a beacon of freedom, as perhaps tariffs on Canada, to extort its sovereignty, do. UK would see alliance with US much as Canada realizes.
There is one and only one reason Trump/US wants Greenland.
There’s more than one. To me, the most plausible one is that Putin has played on his insecurities. He probably told Trump that a president / king / emperor is remembered when they expand their territory, otherwise they’re forgotten. So, off Trump goes, trying to cement his legacy as a great president by expanding US territory. By doing that, he plays right into Putin’s hands by destabilizing the world.
Trump is evil. Overthinking his motivations for evil to conform to your previous worldview harms you. America is “greater” with greater threat it can impose on Europe.
It looks huge on a Mercator Projection map even though it isn’t that large.
In the Mercator projection it appears to have about the same area as Africa, while in reality it is about a 14th of it. But, I wouldn’t say that “isn’t that large”: if Greenland was independent it would be (and Denmark is, because of it) the 12th largest country in the world.
With Tump back in the office, soon enough they’ll be auctioning off federal lands and the postal service. Privatization is back on the menu.
AI slop.
Well, for starters the billboard is only about 15’ tall and goes over the road. That’s not normal. Everything has a odd inconsistent blurry look to it and all of the smaller text is distorted and illegible.
Finally, the details on… well everything are wrong. Why does the white truck in the foreground have one giant door with a handle in the middle and a second handle on the truckbed? What is the traffic flow in this image? How many lanes does the road have? Why are all the lamps on the top of the billboard pointed so weirdly? What sort of neighborhood is this in?
I did not pay attention, dang.
I was thinking there were way too many lamps above that billboard but I don’t know what highway billboards look like, they seem like a US thing.
But the oddly placed handles and doors are a surefire way to tell this is AI, I should look out better for those things!
To the extent that the billboard never existed while the image implies it did – sure.
I love the term ‘slop’. It’s one of my favorite new words along with ‘nontent’.
But this, to me, isn’t that. I think of slop as ‘unrequested, unconvincing, lazy, and lifeless’. In short, ineffective and unwelcome.
I feel like this meme gets the message across. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible. The AI tells are subtle enough: the multi lane pileup in the background and some poor small size text rendering.
Not sure why I felt the need to write this. Guess I’m of the opinion that just because something is AI-generated doesn’t mean it should be discounted immediately, unless it really feels like zero effort went into it. Have a nice day!
Yeah, I feel like there isn’t much of a difference between taking an existing picture and editing the text into it or using AI to generate a picture and editing the text into it.
Because I think the text looks way too good to be done by AI.
I’m fairly certain the text is AI generated too, just because of the questionable “creative” decisions that I don’t think a human would make (why does some of the text have overlines? why is only the Canada line red? why are all the lines jarringly different font sizes?)
plus, now that I zoom in, one of the colons has different sizes for the top and bottom dots. I guess GANs can just do text now
Things you can do when you have fuck-you money to burn: buy a billboard.
I thought about buying / renting a billboard in a small town in Texas where a shitty family mistreated my partner’s nephew when he did a cultural-exchange program (her family is Thai). It would be essentially this but about that family. I didn’t go through with it because they got kicked out of the program via other avenues.
I did buy a discounted ad on a podcast to rail about how much I hate ads. That was fun. I think I paid like $175 or something. I don’t have fuck-you money, but I do have low level fuck-around money.
As usual we’ve found an engaging distraction to play whack-a-mole with for a while. When we get bored with bashing Elon Musk we’ll find another one, never addressing the core problem of how to take down the oligarchy. Because that will take methodical work and a huge amount of diligent research and objective thinking - assuming anybody ever gets around to doing it at all. Most of us just entertain ourselves with angry memes, created by the few people with enough motivation to do even that much. This is why aristocracy systems can keep perpetuating themselves - they rely on human inertia - most people prioritize entertainment over doing anything substantial. Bottom line, that’s the real reason things are the way they are.
