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

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.

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.

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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.

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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

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

hell yeah we should measure every object by how many orcas it is

This is really interesting. As the study notes, this is not a general property of viral infections or even viral respiratory infections, and COVID is actually kinda distinctive in this regard:

Various immune challenges induce diverse immunological responses that differentially involve particular subsets of immune cells and induce disease-specific cytokine and chemokine profiles systemically and in the CNS. The differences in neuroinflammatory profiles observed here in mouse models of SARS-CoV-2 and H1N1 influenza respiratory infection underscore this principle. SARS-CoV-2 infection induces a broad inflammatory response—well beyond the typical type-1 immune response seen with other respiratory viral infections (Lucas et al., 2020). Concordantly, we find here that even mild respiratory COVID can induce prominent elevation of multiple cytokines and chemokines together with lasting reactivity of white matter microglia in subcortical and hippocampal regions. By comparison, H1N1 influenza elicited a partially overlapping but also distinct CSF cytokine/chemokine profile and more restricted pattern of persistent cellular changes.

The reason people are fleeing towards western nations is that the west extracts 25% of its GDP from the impoverished colony states these people are fleeing from.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X

Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

As for the rest of what you said, see my other comment

Why would there be only one lie?

Western audiences care when a lie costs a lot of tax money and soldier’s lives. Under those circumstances the lie eventually hits the headlines. Otherwise people tend not to look into it and the bullshit goes unchallenged, especially when questioning it means denying an atrocity. That’s the whole point of atrocity propaganda. It works especially well on leftists because leftists are goodhearted people who care about atrocities.

For example, saying “Although people died in violent clashes on Chang’an Avenue and elsewhere in Beijing, no one died in Tiananmen Square” is a bad look. Your reaction to it isn’t curiosity, your reaction is “how dare you erase the lives of those thousands of brave students who were crushed into a paste under the treads of tanks in Tiananmen Square!” And I fucking commend that reaction, it proves you have a heart.

and yet

• Wikileaks published diplomatic cables acknowledging that no one died in the square [1].

• Multiple established western journalists who were present at Tiananmen have said that no one died in the square [2][3][4][5][6]. These journalists are all otherwise critics of the Chinese government.

• Multiple organizers of the protests have said that no one died in the square [7]. Hou Dejian, who was there all night, called out the false narrative in an interview: “Are we going to use lies against an enemy who lies?”[8]

• A Spanish film crew was in in the square all night and filmed students leaving peacefully at dawn, singing the Internationale. Here it is on Youtube: [9]. This aired on Hong Kong news but never in the west — I wonder why?

But even if these sources managed to convince you, you’re not gonna go around telling other people, because “The Tiananmen Square massacre never happened” sounds absurd and makes you look like some kind of holocaust denier — except the holocaust is supported by overwhelming evidence and the Tiananmen Square massacre is not.

So now you’re aware of two lies.

Turns out there’s a third lie, and a fourth lie, and…

You could write a post like this on North Korea, and people have [10].

You could write a post like this on Xinjiang, and people have [11].

I’m running out of bookmarks now — I don’t make a habit of writing posts like this — but I hope I have at least gotten the point across that tankies have their reasons, and in a media landscape as distorted as the one we live in I think it is absurd to write them off as easily as people do.

you can just click next and skip it