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.

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.

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.

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 American invasion of Korea killed 20% of the population and leveled 80% of the buildings - over 1.5 million died - and now the nation responsible annually conducts the world’s largest military exercises on the north/south border.

also some of the more outrageous stories and defector testimonies about north korea have turned out to be false, like the “all men are required to get haircuts matching kim jong un” story, which turned out to be unsourced claims from radio free asia, and contradicted the equally unsourced bullshit story that men were forbidden to get the kim jong un haircut

they aren’t