Like I said, you will have precisely 0 problem in telling whatever narrative on Lemmy.world or wherever. You are spouting a comfortable myth which is commonly believed on .ml but has no basis in reality and is in fact 100% backwards.

I’ll prove it: Tell me the narrative, and I guarantee you we will be able to talk about it for any length of time without anyone coming in and doing any serious censorship.

The UK in 1985 was being run by people who grew up getting their cities bombed out and not having enough to eat because of the war, or having friends and family members dead because they were in the infantry and didn’t come back.

I posted a chart elsewhere in these comments; all during the modern era it’s been hovering around 1.5%, and then suddenly in the last few years people are invested in paying more, what with the US and Russia collaborating to make them nervous about their safety again.

People on every other instance are able to say whatever they want, they can have open discussion, they can criticize .ml or NATO or Trump or the Democrats. Which is as it should be.

The mythology that .ml enacts its insane level of censorship because it’s helping people “crack through the programming” by expressing viewpoints and arguments that are also allowed everywhere else, and the censorship is a necessary part of making that possible (by banning any disagreement shielding it from the commonsense arguments that generally can debunk it), is some Karl Rove shit.

Until the USA goes full dictatorship (admittedly less hypothetical than I’d like)

I have bad news for you.

I’m not trying to exaggerate the situation, but they’re imprisoning journalists, kicking random people out of the country or keeping them in conditions so bad that it sometimes kills them, they just bombed a random country ignoring the system that’s supposed to make that illegal without authorization, and so on and so on. They just assassinated a Democratic politician.

It’s all a spectrum. People are still in the streets without being shot, they’re still backing down or being forced to free some particular people. But the standard of “going to war without authorization” is a guard-rail that fell years ago, and more are falling every week now. If you’re waiting for the moment to fight back against the dictatorship, this is it.

It’s been 2%. Historically a lot of NATO wasn’t meeting that, but in the last few years people have been taking it a lot more seriously.

5% is, in fact, a whole shitload.

The US is at about 3%, which is an insane amount a lot of which gets allocated to random domestic pork-barrel projects, or basic scientific research which is just getting funneled through the “defense” department for basically no reason. Upping it to more than the US spends per capita on its military is bonkers.

That being said, I get it. These are bonkers times. Russia is doing for-real military invasions and bombing whole cities and shows no signs of wanting to stop, and the US is no longer a reliable partner for defense and deterrence. It might be fine, but it might not. It’s time to get ready to look after our own safety again, after a long period of not really having to worry as long as you were white and Western. I get why they’re doing it.

It was always thus. Wars are incredibly profitable, the sides don’t really matter if your goal is to get rich off them.

They don’t actually like Israel. They like Iran, which is why their mouthpieces in the GOP were trying to get the US not to attack. But, like all bullies, when it’s time for them to stand up for their friends, they suddenly have this big explanation which no one needs to believe why it’s not a big deal and they were actually always good friends with the other guy.

Besides, what would they be able to send even if they wanted to or cared what happens to the people of Iran? A gift card? They’re fighting a country smaller than California and getting all fucked up, and they have nothing really to spare at this point anyway. Iran is the breadwinner in that relationship.

No idea about tools although I hope you find something.

Two related suggestions that will change your life:

1. Grunt Fund if you are making decisions about equity
2. Have people estimate the total time for a task, rigidly enforce that every man-hour spent on a project has to be allocated to one of those tasks (including the elusive but vital “oh shit we forgot” task), keep track of the coefficient between the two. It’ll be different for different people sometimes. When estimating a project, have people come up with estimates and then multiply by the coefficient. Be transparent with everyone about this system. It’ll revolutionize your project management life once people get used to it. I tried to find a blog post which explains more detail, but honestly, it’s not complicated, and Google is too shit now to find it.