Russia managed to hold onto Crimea, an important warm water port.
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.
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.
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.
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
not looking forward to water wars in the global south
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.
Fabricated claims about Iraqi WMDs were based on a Nicholas Cage movie called The Rock
David Weisberg, who co-wrote 1996 thriller which Chilcot inquiry suspected to be source for crucial yet false details about Iraq’s nerve gas resource, says he was dismayed experts didn’t realise green balls of gas were fabrication
> “What was so amazing,” said Weisberg, “was anybody in the poison gas community would immediately know that this was total bullshit – such obvious bullshit.”
In the movie, poison gas is contained in these little green glass spheres connected together like a string of pearls, basically because it looks cool and because fragile glass spheres full of poison gas are exciting. They really milked it in the movie.
> “Unfortunately chemical weapons are very boring because essentially they’re a two-chamber cell with two odourless and colourless gases in each chamber. When the shell is detonated, the gases mix and become the [nerve agent] VX. > > “There was no way to do that [realistically] on the screen with any kind of excitement. In real life it’s all invisible and boring, as per usual. So we invented this string-of-pearls approach to have these little globes with green gases in them, to give visual interest and to create jeopardy. If one of these globules broke you’d be in real trouble.”
In real life, chemical weapons look nothing like that. And yet:
> Chilcot’s findings reported that questions were raised after “[i]t was pointed out that glass containers were not typically used in chemical munitions, and that a popular movie [The Rock] had inaccurately depicted nerve agents being carried in glass beads or spheres”.