And it’s a problem there too. Both Australia and Canada need to cool it with the anti-immigrant scapegoating unless they want to end up like America. Ultimately the main reason I chose Australia over Canada was due to it’s further distance from the US making it less likely to get embridled in geopolitical conflicts with the US, like Canada already is with these tariff wars

Yes, I’m very aware that Australia (and the whole of the world for that matter) also has rising far-right and anti-immigration sentiment. I’m not sure why so many people in this thread think I was born yesterday and have done 0 research on the matter of where I hope to spend the rest of my life. Ultimately anywhere is better than the US though, and I can’t allow myself to be so caught up in self-defeatist thoughts like “everywhere has rising far-right politics” or “nowhere is safe” or “immigration is too hard” that I stay paralyzed in the line of danger.

My decision to choose Australia over Canada was ultimately a matter of degree. I felt a country further from the US would be more safe geopolitcally, Australia’s higher foreign-born population would lead to a less xenophobic culture, and compulsory voting laws would keep far-right politicians from gaining or maintaining a foothold, thank you for your concern

I’m well aware of the Australian housing crisis, and of it’s far-right politicians like Dutton. I was also aware that there were other reasons for Trudeau being unpopular besides immigration (hence why it wasn’t the sole statistic I provided, I used Trudeau’s approval ratings as somewhat of a general metric for Canada turning against left-leaning politicians, and I used the other two statistics to try to show Canada’s anti-immigrant attitudes. Without spending exorbitant amounts of time studying Canadian politics this was the quickest summary statistics I choose to look at).

I criticized Canada for having poor attitudes towards immigration, and I would criticize Australia for the same, these two opinions aren’t mutually exclusive. Ultimately my personal decision to attempt to immigrate to Australia rather than Canada came down to choosing ‘the lesser of two evils’ (which as an American I am very practiced in doing. ha. ha.)

Specifically, I thought Australia’s further distance from the US would make it safer geopolitically, it’s higher foreign-born population would make it so that way ‘anti-immigration’ sentiment didn’t become ‘anti-immigrant’ sentiment, and it’s compulsory voting laws would make it harder for far-right politicians to gain and/or maintain a foothold. I truly did not intend for my personal decision to go to Australia over Canada to be some kind of dig at Canada, though I did get defensive at the dismissive claim that the limited research I have done was just “propaganda getting to me.” Apologies if I was a bit aggressive in my critique of Canadian attitudes towards immigration

It’s a matter of degree. Australia has a housing crisis and many want to lower immigration, but their starting level of immigration was already incredibly high, for instance 30% of the population is foreign born, as compared to Canada’s 21%. A marginal difference, but it still contributes to a culture more accepting of immigrants.

You know, I think somehow the rhetoric has gotten mixed up here though. I have said ‘As a victim currently being forced to flee my fascist home country, I think Canada could stand to be more accepting of immigrants’ and you have heard ‘Canada sucks so hard I won’t go there even though I’m American (and thus an uninformed idiot).’

I think it’s part of an overarching narrative I’ve seen, of people from non-US countries hating on Americans for not voting/volunteering/working hard enough to stop Trump from being elected, that ‘America = Bad’ and ‘[Insert My Country Here] = Good, and we would never be like Bad America.’ It goes without saying that I voted Harris & phone banked often. I don’t think Canada is a bad country, I think it’s amazing, even! But I also find the sheer amount of nationalistic rhetoric I’ve seen both around and directly here in this thread deeply worrying.

Like, you do realize that you’re essentially responding to a trans person, a potential victim of genocide, with ‘Haha, you’re such an idiot! Don’t you realize nowhere is safe for you? Don’t you realize everywhere has rising far-right politics and hatred of immigrants? Have fun immigrating to a country that hates you to escape a dictatorship you tried to stop but ultimately had no control over!’

I’m very aware that Australia also has an upswing in anti-immigrant rhetoric. I find it deeply unempathetic of you to try and use it as some sort of ‘gotcha’ to prove that your country is amazing (or that other countries are just as bad). I’m currently having to flee the country I’ve called home my entire life due to political persecution. I think it would be helpful if people could remember that I’m an actual person and not just another ‘stupid American’

I don’t think I have all the answers, buddy, I’m just defending myself from the accusation that because I happen to not have a favorable view of your country in regards to immigration (and mysteriously, it gets less and less favorable the more actually interact with Canadians) that means I’ve somehow fallen prey to propaganda

I tried to defend myself by showing the statistics I had seen showing that Canadians aren’t currently partial to immigrants, and you are responding by essentially saying ‘responding with statistics must mean you think you know everything, you know-it-all.’ I am willing to learn and engage with actual evidence, this is just an ad hominem attack

Genuinely, where do you think I should get my impression of Canada from? Perhaps this Lemmy instance, where the prevailing response to me going: ‘hey, Canada has a lot of hatred towards immigrants, as a victim of a fascist government forced to flee my home country I decided to search elsewhere’ was ‘um, ACTUALLY, the place you have chosen to go to ALSO hates PEOPLE LIKE YOU, and you (the victim of a fascist government trying to kill you for being a minority) should’ve DONE YOUR RESEARCH(??) because Canada ALSO HAS A MASSIVE PROPAGANDA PROBLEM which is why you should COME TO CANADA INSTEAD’

Frankly, I fear all I have learned from this is that Canadians, unlike the stereotype, are deeply unempathetic people who currently seem to be pushing a narrative of “Canada good, America (and Americans) bad.” Hence the claims I’ve seen on Lemmy that ‘Americans deserve to suffer under fascism’ because ‘we didn’t work/vote/volunteer hard enough to stop it.’

In this case, America = Bad bc American doctors (smart) are leaving. Canada = Good bc American doctors want to go there. So, under this framing, me criticizing Canadian attitudes against immigration somehow becomes me (stupid American) hating on Canada as a whole. Queue the dogpiling about how I’m an ‘uninformed idiot’ and I’ve ‘bought the propaganda’ despite the fact I’ve been researching how to immigrate for the past few months

Forgive me if this came out a bit hostile, I’m a bit frustrated right now, you know, from the whole ‘fleeing my country that wants to genocide me’ thing. As a warning, I’d be wary of dismissing the blatantly nationalistic attitudes of your fellow countrymen as “oh that’s just how Canadians on Reddit behave.” After all, glossing over just how many fascists my country had was what got us Trump.

I wasn’t reading news articles so much as I as reading Reddit comments (back when I still used Reddit), which is certainly still not a completely comprehensive read of the whole Canadian population, but it’s about as close as I can get without being in Canada myself. To be honest though, having most of the media controlled by right wing groups is another concern, though I do hope your elections go well

I think it’s important to remember immigration isn’t just some lever you can turn on and off: “oh we’re having issues with quality of life so let’s stop letting immigrants in,” “oh but we want highly educated people like doctors so lets let them in.” Prospective immigrants will remember at best the wishy-washy stance on whether or not immigrants should be let in, at worst the outright xenophobic sentiment they had heard. This especially goes for people in highly educated professions like doctors, who are desirable immigrants in any countries, and thus have options to pick and choose where they want to go.

I know when my parents (who are both doctors) started looking into investing a bit in other countries, Canada wasn’t even considered, they went straight to investing in Europe. When I told them I was looking into foreign colleges, they suggested schools in New Zealand, in Germany, in Sweden… they didn’t once recommend Canada. Well, this is just anecdotal evidence, and I’m sure many many American doctors will flee to Canada. But I wouldn’t assume just because doctors are leaving the US necessarily means they’re going to Canada

The funny thing about immigration is that it turns out I don’t need to research every single ‘might be good, might be bad’ country out there. I only needed to find a single country that had lenient immigration laws and would be accepting of me. Australia was that country for me, though it has it’s own issues as all countries do. Personally, I don’t think I should need to have some degree in foreign politics to be able to decide which countries would/wouldn’t be welcoming to me. If anything, if Canada has some massive propaganda problem where all searchable metrics (58% Trudeau disapproval ratings, 58% think too much immigration, 41% anxious immigrant rights get too much attention), then perhaps “too much propaganda” is yet another reason to avoid Canada.

Sure, but not to the same degree. I don’t know much about Canadian politics but for a time my social media was filled with post after post bashing Trudeau and favoring more far-right politicians just over immigration policy. It was enough to turn me off of your country as a whole, if immigrants are so hated there.

I’m a current American bio student planning to go into healthcare, can confirm I’m planning to go to grad school abroad to hopefully escape the US. I’m not planning to go to Canada though, I’m planning to go to Australia. I decided not to look into Canada after hearing of it’s rising far-right and anti-immigrant sentiment. If Canada wants US brain drain Canadians would have to be willing to accept American immigrants, even with how poorly many Canadians view Americans right now

Well, I get that Lemmy is an alternative social media, but it’s not really an alternative to Facebook. Anonymous usernames, text-based posts, you can’t follow people, Fediverse is somewhat confusing… I’d recommend it as an alternative to Reddit, but probably not the website where boomers want to check up on their neighbors and friends

I also feel like a lot of people have a lot of barriers to plotting an assassination, besides the obvious “it’s illegal” and “they’ll kill you for trying” and “who has the time and money to plan an assassination.” To give people some ideas of these barriers, I personally:

• Am trans, so if I tried anything it would immediately be used as a Reichstag fire moment to start rounding up and killing trans people (I suspect the social minorities who will be most affected by the Administration will suffer the worst consequences for even trying to resist)
• Am too young to own a gun in my state (you need to be 21, I suspect some people have the opposite reasoning as well, ‘I’m too old to be an assassin bc I have kids to look after’ or ‘because I’m entrenched and needed at my job’)
• Since I have PTSD I don’t trust myself to own a gun
• I think I can contribute more to the world alive than throwing my life away to be a political assassin. Specifically, I’m very passionate about healthcare reform (obviously universal healthcare, also focusing more on preventative medicine instead of waiting for people to get so chronically sick the pharmaceutical industry can harvest money from them for the rest of their lives, also giving people diet & lifestyle recommendations to treat the underlying cause of their issues instead of just drugging them up to combat their symptoms of disease), and think I have a greater chance of making an impactful change by devoting myself to that

In conclusion, the most convenient person to plot a political assassination is a 25-35 yo straight white man well trained in firearms with tons of money, mentally healthy enough to get a firearm yet crazy enough to throw their life away, ideally recently unemployed so they have nothing to lose.

So… a security guard affected by the mass government downsizing?

Aughaughaughsjscjf did some ppl just not get the memo, or is this more of that “I don’t care if bad things happen so long as I’m not associated with the cause of it” mentality you usually see from non-voters?

I genuinely think the type of social media you use in your youth has a very strong influence on the type of person you become:

Instagram/Snapchat: Average, slightly sociable

Reddit/Tumblr: Insightful, knowledgeable about niche topics/social issues (respectively), better at writing, worse at socializing

Twitter: Argumentative, not really capable of cohesive long-form thought, great at one liners though

TikTok: Mindless beasts conditioned through a variable-ratio positive reinforcement algorithm to uncritically believe whatever thoughts China wants to insert in their brains: “The US is awful!!” Heck yeah! “Because of this, we’re going to not vote/vote for Trump!” Wait, what?

So, back in 2023 I discovered Lemmy, made an account, but after a bit quit again because I never checked it. I recently made an account again since Reddit has started getting really bad (tons of bots, tons of conservative posts on r/popular after the election, etc) and only recently started actually using said account.

I think using Lemmy requires a different strategy than using Reddit. On Reddit, if you wanted to subscribe to, say, a Linux discussion group, you would just go to r/linux, and there would be just 4 more even more niche subs you could join, like r/linux4noobs. On Lemmy, their are 6 main Linux groups and 14 niche Linux groups across several instances.

The first time I joined Lemmy, I subscribed to just one of these groups like I would on Reddit, but my feed didn’t have enough content so eventually I got bored. The second time around, I created I’ve just subscribed broadly to every community related to my interests, so I if I was interested in Linux I would subscribe to all 20 Linux communities.

I then hypothesized that if I did this for every interest (ex, say my only interests were Linux & Plants, or something), that discussion of topics that was more popular on Lemmy, like Linux, would drown out my other interests. To avoid this being an issue, I made 3 accounts for 3 feeds

• My “general account” in which I subscribed to nearly every top sub, so if I found I didn’t care about a certain topic on All I could unsubscribe instead of outright blocking those communities (that’s this account)
• My “interests account” in which I subscribed to my personalized interests like privacy or environment
• My “fun account” in which I subscribed to just meme, gaming, cats, etc communities

That’s all just me though, how do y’all use Lemmy differently from Reddit? I’m curious as to how I can git gud at Lemmy lol

For anyone who is undocumented (and people who are documented!), it’s important to know your rights regarding ICE:

1. Don’t open the door for ICE. They aren’t allowed into your house or workplace without a warrant signed by a judge.
2. Ask them to leave.
3. Stay silent. Do not talk to them without a lawyer.
4. If you ask you your immigration status, your citizenship status, etc, don’t tell them anything. Don’t even speak to them.
5. Even if you’re a citizen, still don’t tell them anything. ICE destroys communities, and every second of their time you waste is one less second they will spend destroying people’s lives.
6. If you are detained, ask to talk to your lawyer. Note that ICE doesn’t provide lawyers so make sure you get one in preparation.
7. Do not sign anything or give them any documents whatsoever without a lawyer in that room.

This is all such a strawman argument

“and you have to pay for it when I’m in prison.”

Yeah, isn’t it so terrible for checks notes incarcerated people with no income to pay for medical insurance to have access to necessary healthcare…? Seriously though, you know for a fact ‘trans people in prison getting healthcare’ is not the issue that people have with the trans community, because if it was, the legislation would tackle only this. Instead, the issue seems to be with our very existence, hence the denying trans people exist, hence the branding trans people as pedophiles, etc

“You have to let me play sports against biological girls. You can’t make me play sports against boys - it has to be girls”.

Again, where is the proof? Which untransitioned trans woman has ever actually said this? And, for transitioned trans women, why does the issue of childrens sports teams need to be regulated by the federal government? Consider the following study: “Limited evidence suggests that physical performance of nonathletic trans people who have undergone GAHT for at least 2 years approaches that of cisgender controls. Further controlled longitudinal research is needed in trans athletes and nonathletes.”

In my opinion, the question of “trans people in sports” is one for science, not one for politics. For instance, perhaps for sports like running, a trans woman can compete in women’s sports after 2 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy (“After 2 years of GAHT, no advantage was observed for physical performance measured by running time or in trans women”). For sports like rowing, you could have it be 4 years (“By 4 years, there was no advantage in sit-ups”)

Trans women that demand to use the women’s restrooms before they are effectively transitioned.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen any sort of video evidence that trans women are actually doing this. The trans community gets harrassed so much most untransitioned trans women either go to the mens bathroom or just hold it.

The LGBT+ community has spent its entire political capital on those three issues.

The LGBT+ community has absolutely not focused on these issues, at all. Rather, right-wing think tanks like FOX News keep pushing false narratives down the general public throat, misrepresenting what the LGBT+ community wants (to have hormone replacement therapy and gender affirming surgery on the market, to not be legislated out of existence, to not be discriminated against or hate crimed, etc) into some BS strawman seemingly only constructed to make the trans community look unreasonable, or something.

For what it’s worth, people are usually only inclined to take action after they themselves have been hurt so badly they have no other options left. I wouldn’t expect to see any political assassinations until our grandparents are losing their homes, food gets so expensive people cannot eat, censorship has taken away comforts like porn, and unemployment is incredibly high

Once all of that happens and still no action is taken by anyone, then yeah I’ll agree most gun nuts only collect firearms to LARP getting to kill minorities.

I’d recommend Ubuntu. I’ve never tried Mint like others have suggested, but one of the strengths of Ubuntu is that it’s one of the more popular distros, which means if you want to install a program, it probably has an easy install version for Ubuntu/Debian, or specific instructions, or just a lot of people online who have had the same errors as you and can give you suggestions when something starts causing issues

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” except frustratingly this actually does work when half the time the solution to technical issues is turning on/off, uninstalling/reinstalling, restarting, or reloading the program. So I guess nowadays the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again for a period longer than 30 minutes before googling to see if anyone else has had the same problem”