I appreciate your honesty! This was a very shameful period for us, I'm not going to try and defend it. He was later banned (I think I know which screenshot you mean) when he conspired with the Infrared community* to infiltrate the wiki. Since then we've been completely free of patsocs.
Called it. They run the super egregious impossible license for a few weeks, then walk it back and pull something still bad, but not as bad as the red herring proposal.
Fun fact: that's a breach of their human rights. You can't extradite refugees so they will be drafted into war.
there really is an emoji for everything
If you outshine and outperform the owner by the laws of meritocracy you should get ownership of the business
Beehaw are snakes and nothing they say should be trusted, I remember them trying to get people to leave lemmy.ml for their instance with the sole argument being they don't federate with lemmygrad back in the day when there were like 5 instances. Their main recruitment tactic was to talk about lemmygrad lol. One argument they used to defederate from lemmygrad back then was that we were apparently so big, we filled up their disk space when they opened federation. And then they found out it was actually a bug and log files didn't get deleted. Took them a few days to actually go into the FTP and look at it lol (and back then lemmy.ml was as big as us anyway). We received neither an apology or an offer to refederate.
Now they make a ton of donation money and can get additional admins and even community mods. On lemmygrad we have no problem being federated with lib instances like world or ee and we don't make a single cent in donation to host the website or work on it.
They're just typical anti-communists.
Um if it's not how they work, then how come I just did it?
I thought lemmy.ca defederated from hexbear, why do they care about this lol. You're living rent-free in their heads.
One good thing this federation-stir has done is make the liberals on lemmy realize they're not actually the majority and there's a whole world out there. They really thought that if they blocked lemmygrad they were not going to see communist stuff anymore and as we all know, if I can't see it then it doesn't exist, and then bam, hexbear appears in their rear-view mirror.
The only two instances one needs is lemmygrad and hexbear. In whichever order they prefer.
You know there are actually people living in China, including foreigners, and you can ask them about the "social credit score" right? And they all say they've never heard of it. On Baidu they actually joke about it because westerners think it actually exists. You can even ask them any other question about China you want! You don't have to limit yourself to one topic!
OP explicitly said
Bonus points if you don’t consult the state department
You don't get the bonus points. In fact, you get points deducted.
According to some Jewish orgs it would (sometimes they're also Zionist themselves though, especially all the big ones like the ADL). Depends what they think of the Beijing riots, but they essentially all consider downplaying the Holocaust as being Holocaust denial. Good catch comrade 
We get posted on r/tankiejerk (for the fourth time) -> we get posted on Twitter by some euro liberal -> we get posted by socialism done left himself.
Anyway we've never been visited this much.
Actually no, we've doubled our visits since we had that thread on Yeonmi Park go viral (on Twitter), and our most visited day was march 1st, which is still unbeaten. But the SDL shoutout has set a new 2nd place record.
Gaza is not only dense but well-defended. They have networks of tunnels dug under the city and extending out of Gaza. Fighters can disappear an IOF soldier in 10 seconds in their tunnels and you'll never see him again. The last time they tried to enter, in 2014, one IOF soldier came out of it describing the experience like so: It was hell. Everything you touched could explode against you. Everyone you see could pull a weapon and shoot you as soon as you turn your head. And there's lots of people. You move step by step, as if in the dark, and just hope you make it out alive.
Honestly a land invasion of Gaza might be their nail in the coffin. This is where they do not have superiority. They can bomb Gaza all they want, but they can't invade it and succeed. Both times they've tried it was a colossal defeat for them.
Compound that with the fact that the IOF is a serious paper tiger. They can claim they're the most disciplined army in the Middle East or whatever as much as they want, but video footage shows an army in disarray, shooting at their own, not practising the most basic amount of safety. Remember the video from a few years ago of an IOF soldier picking up a flag someone planted on the Gaza border fence and just casually bringing it up to his mates before it exploded in his hands? All they know is to terrorize civilians, once the civilians start shooting back they don't know what to do.