iie

joined 1 year ago
[–] iie@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

was it ridiculous for people to doubt that iraq had wmds?

[–] iie@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] iie@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] iie@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] iie@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

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

[–] iie@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] iie@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

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?

[–] iie@lemmy.ml -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] iie@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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.

[–] iie@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] iie@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

eh, 12/10 is more informative than 2

[–] iie@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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

 

“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”.

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