Lot of stuff already listed so here are some more niche channels if you are interested:

Meteorology: WeatherWest

Geography & climate: Casual Earth

Nutrition: No Lab Coat Required

Probably not collectively but for the people making these decisions it is.

There are always ways to resist, even in repressive environments. Sometimes it might not be as obvious or as heroic as what we might imagine. It might even be as simple as a nearly invisible act of non-compliance. But these things still matter. In extremely repressive countries, it’s often these small actions, when widespread, that can interfere with their power at key moments, even sometimes leading to the regime’s downfall.

We often imagine that the most effective resistance is some dramatic violent act. But real life isn’t a marvel movie. The most important axis of resistance isn’t how impactful your individual acts are, it’s how widespread and organized this resistance is.

We can’t give you specific advice because the most effective actions are specific to the context, and some forms of resistance that effective in some places may be too dangerous in others. But there are people in your country who have the answers. You just need to find them. In most countries they’re active resistance groups but if that’s not safe than any community orgs that aren’t actively supporting the regime and building independent power can be important. Finding them and supporting one another is the only solution to your problem. But be sure to find groups that respect you and your safety because some can be abusive or cult-like as well.

You’re tired because you’re alone. Many of us feel this way, but the support of allies is what will energize you and find you a productive and safe outlet for your anger. Because you should be angry. We should all be angry. Shit is fucked everywhere.

I think that statement could be interpreted a few different ways but regardless I think it’s helpful background information to know that they aren’t considering the context at all.

My understanding is it’s being removed regardless of context.

I’m not sure this would be that cute. Sea lions can weigh hundreds of pounds and have big teeth so it depends on just how young we’re talking… if he’s close to full size it would be more terrifying than cute.

He kinda looks better. If he just stopped making that face he would look like a normal human.

Just the whole country or is the a specific movement you’re referring to?

Only to avoid the humiliation of being impeached. He waited until they informed him they had the votes, so I don’t think this is the best example.

What evidence is there that violent protest works?

Another thought I had is what if he was still writing it?

Very surprising. I have the same car and drive mostly on electricity from a trickle charger. I hate gasoline so I probably wouldn’t switch even if it was more expensive, especially since I only drive about once a week, but still. My garage is extra cold too due to my heat pump water heater, so that could make things worse.

So the people who were saying this is a political witch hunt are full of shit.

The judge won’t allow that as evidence, I guarantee it.

Yeah discoverability is a huge issue. I feel like tech people often get stuck on the fact that most regular people don’t want to do a ton of work to browse the web, they just want content to come to them. I know people in the fediverse have negative feelings about algorithms (and most that exist today are harmful) but does a transparent, community-managed algorithm have to be a bad thing?

Seems like a lot of people prefer bluesky for whatever reason. I wouldn’t know since I’ve no interest in either.

I think it’s more helpful to identify that the issue is boots on our neck, not who is wearing them. What’s the point of fighting for a new government that’s hardly better than the last?

Even if there’s no clear alternative focused on human liberation today, it’s better to build consciousness so that one can be created than tug of war back and forth between tyrants with different colored flags.

The US has many flaws and these incidents were terrible. But these largely didn’t involve the modern intelligence apparatus we are discussing. We have large numbers of people here on Lemmy actively calling for a socialist revolution but they’re completely safe as long as they follow the law.

Try calling for revolution in China and see how it goes. Leaders of even relatively non-political protest movements or advocates for minority rights are frequently disappeared or executed. In the US, there may be isolated incidents of this nature (typically by local law enforcement) but largely social critics are free to organize legal resistance to the state without repression.

Of course, there are reasons to worry we might be headed in that direction. All the more reason to organize and resist while you still can.

To be clear, I don’t ascribe these actions to communism. China is not communist by any reasonable definition. I ascribe these actions to authoritarianism. While the US is somewhat authoritarian, it is less so than China (at least within its borders—foreign policy is a different can of worms).

There has been some debate about exactly what Marx intended by this phrase but regardless his intentions, in my view it was always doomed to be abused in this way. This was pointed out forcefully by Bakunin and other contemporaries of Marx in the socialist movement, and it came to pass exactly as they predicted. Who decides what constitutes “bourgeois interest” or “false consciousness”? The party of course, and who controls the party? The party leadership, or in other words, Lenin, Stalin, or whoever else manages to connive their way onto the throne. This is far from a proletarian democracy, and if that’s what Marx wanted, he ought to have chosen his words far more carefully.

This also dovetails with another key flaw in Marxism which is its class reductionism. Political leaders can and do have distinct interests from the proletariat, even when they may have once belonged to that class. We see this tension clearly in every supposed proletarian government in history, and many others besides. So in addition to the problems of top-down hierarchy, the decision to have Bolshevik leaders be full-time revolutionaries was also a large contributor to their alienation from the people whose interests they claimed to pursue, and the horrific violence they soon inflicted in on them.

The US may collect as much or more information as China but their enforcement actions taken based on this information are far far more limited.