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.

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. i’m not here to fight a court case, i just find the dismissal baffling.

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.

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.

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.

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.