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

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.

the russian soul

I hope you’ve lived in Russia all your life, because it seems pretty gauche to make sweeping statements about the essential character of an entire population you are not a member of

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.

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

there is no “sway” when everyone can start their own instance

people use social media to see posts and talk to people. they are gonna go wherever they can see the most posts and talk to the most people. federation is what keeps this gravitational pull from creating a monopoly as everyone flocks to the largest site with the most content.

thankfully beehaw is not the largest site with the most content — lemmy.world is bigger. otherwise, beehaw’s aggressive blocking of other instances might start causing users of those instances to jump ship to beehaw, killing off the competition and making beehaw a monopoly.

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

it is a threat if users jump ship to beehaw from the smaller instances beehaw has blocked. but when I wrote that comment I wasn’t aware that lemmy.world is now three times the size of beehaw, at least according to this tally https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. that should counterbalance things.

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.

eh, 12/10 is more informative than 2

oh I agree that two nations can both be assholes. just wanted to add some context for their militarism and paranoia

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