Russia managed to hold onto Crimea, an important warm water port.

was it ridiculous for people to doubt that iraq had wmds?

as a sane person, I actually did look into it, and found that structural steel does weaken significantly at the temperature jet fuel burns at.

Thank you for all your work.

for anyone not familiar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

“Embrace, extend, and extinguish” (EEE), also known as “embrace, extend, and exterminate”, is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.

what they hate is there being cultural aspects not under their control

china claims they were interning uighurs to prevent extremist terrorism and separatism, not control culture. xinjiang shares a border with afghanistan. the claim is that uighurs were going off to fight in syria and other regions, then coming back to start shit at home. china claims the mass detainment of uighurs was to provide language and vocational training to counter the sway of jihadists returning from the middle east.

sane leftists generally simply discount tankie talking points out of hand

how is this sane? tankies might well be wrong, but I don’t see how they’re obviously wrong. the west does lie about its enemies. a million iraqis died on a lie in our lifetimes. i’m not here to fight a court case, i just find the dismissal baffling.

you could send that article from the guardian about fabricated north korean defector stories. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-korean-defector-testimonies-so-often-fall-apart

Off the top of my head: Salvador Allende in Chile, and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, were democratically elected socialist leaders who afaik did nothing the average person would consider a major human rights violation. Both of them were couped by the west and replaced with right-wing dictators.

I suggest this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E

Thanks for this write-up. Great link to send people.

you don’t think it’s nuts for snowden critics to mod privacy subreddits when snowden is the guy behind the main leak that showed how fucked our privacy is?

it’s anti-competitive, which goes against the “no one group is in charge” spirit of the fediverse. Beehaw is a large instance with a lot of sway.

The issue with this is beehaw is large enough that them defederating from other instances is potentially a serious threat to those instances. Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation. Moves like this could be interpreted as an attempt to become the dominant instance, defeating the purpose of the fediverse.

The move to extend the exemptions, rather than winding them down, amounts to a recognition by U.S. authorities that efforts to isolate China from high-tech goods are more difficult than anticipated in a highly integrated global industry, according to industry executives.

what is that middle bullet doing in there

eh, 12/10 is more informative than 2

I think you can see how many instances an instance has defederated from here, in the “Bl” column https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. scroll down to All Lemmy Instances

beehaw has defederated from 352 other lemmy instances, including two of the largest - lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. I would be cautious about settling in there.

it’s also possible China censored the internet as a form of protectionism. social networks tend to form monopolies because people go wherever everyone else is. whichever state that network is based in then gets a boost to its tech industry