imagine being the guy who facilitated one of the largest terrorist attacks in history and has likely prompted many countries - those that either oppose the US or are on the fence - to quietly start ensuring their communication devices are made entirely within friendly countries with total oversight of the production chain and thus destroying a potential avenue of attack on US allies and very probably disrupting existing digital surveillance of the politicians of those countries. at least you get a new name and like $50 million out of it, if you weren’t killed.

the consequences will not be immediately apparent, there probably won’t be a dramatic collapse of any particular company or a bunch of people going to jail, but this has really gotta be one of the most short-sighted moves in recent history. it’s like the US is begging other countries to make closer ties to China, just so they don’t wake up with their phones or pagers exploding on their nightstand because they decided to not let, idk, a Canadian mining corporation in to massively exploit them. they used this massive tactic which could have been used anywhere in the world with a vulnerable supply chain to… achieve a small military result against Hezbollah which they have by now almost certainly recovered from?

if I was China right now, I’d be going around to every country outside of the West and going “hey, do you want phones that won’t explode? buy some from us!”

The only times this doesn’t work is if the person resists breathing it in so their blood-CO2 levels build up until they’re in agony and either eventually gives in, or passes out and starts involuntarily breathing.

Hence why that execution a while ago which was supposed to go well ended so badly - the person was sentenced to death, obviously did not want to die, and so resisted it. So, it’s a pretty good method of self-euthanasia because you (presumably) want to die and so will breathe it in with no struggle. A pretty bad method of executing people (from a pain standpoint), unless you wait until they’re asleep I suppose.

I do like it when otherwise quite serious people break from their carefully studied analysis and start going like “God, I fucking hate that guy, he’s such a clown.” Very nice to see thinkers and authors in the West who don’t have weird brainworms where they have to both-sides everything, and they just outwardly say that NATO is the imperialist force against Russia and resistance against Israel is perfectly justified. With these kinds of white academics, I’m increasingly hating having to go through the five-minute tedium of “What Hamas did was atrocious. Worst thing I’ve ever seen. Nobody is justifying that, I’m not justifying it. It was horrific, it was atrocious, over a thousand people were killed…” and the same thing with Russia, before they actually get to talking about the genocide which has killed hundreds of thousands of people in one of the most brutal ways possible. Very glad to see that Gabriel doesn’t see any need to do that song and dance.

I’m also getting very tired of the two poles of the argument being “Palestine/the Resistance is being destroyed and that’s good” in the imperialist West and “Palestine/the Resistance is being destroyed and that’s bad” among the left-wing Western intelligentsia. It tends to be people actually in the Middle East who have been studying the situation in-depth for decades who are like “Many people are dying but the Resistance is winning, actually.” Like Amal Saad, for example. They don’t ignore the problems that the Resistance faces, but they’re actually observing Palestine and Lebanon and Yemen and Syria and Iraq fighting back and including that in their analysis and predictions, rather than the very meek, semi-defeatist words that are coming out of several Western thinkers where they never even seem to mention the Resistance as a serious entity, they only talk about the civilian casualties and talking about the failing diplomatic efforts for a ceasefire. Which is better than not doing that at all, as most Western media doesn’t, but there should be higher standards.

The talk itself was good too, of course. I liked the part where he’s talking about Stalin and how what he did makes a lot of sense in the context he was dealing with (every developed country on the planet fucking HATING the USSR and wishing for its immediate destruction, and Russia being a feudal backwater that needed to do in 10 years what Europe and America did in 100, with all the massive problems that causes). And that it’s bad history, bad politics, and bad analysis to remove Stalin from that context and judge him as if he was in a situation where there were no threats at all and everything was sunshine and rainbows, and he was just an evil authoritarian who liked causing suffering.

Having moral judgements about historical events is fine, but only once there’s a good understanding of what the actual conditions were and what constraints people and parties were under that would have prevented them from acting perfectly and with perfect information. We should deal with hypotheticals as little as possible in that regard, only offering genuinely practical advice. No “well, China shouldn’t have reformed and opened up under Deng because it would have kept the communist project purer despite all the hardship,” we should try and understand why Deng and the party did what it did, what successes they had, what errors they made, and learn and improve on it. A philosophy of genuinely trying to learn and improve will help prepare us for the mistakes - BIG mistakes! - that Western left parties will inevitably make (just as Mao and Stalin made big mistakes) as the imperial core weakens over the coming decades.

He also said that Moscow was planning a coordinated invasion of Ukrainian nuclear power plants.

Yeah, we did have some discussion in our top secret news mega mod chat about this topic. Myself in particular was worried about removing news about more obscure places where news about events can take a while to percolate out of, or news/analysis that initially seemed unimportant later became very important.

My impression has been that the proposed set of rules is more about codifying existing but unlisted rules, as well as some minor improvements. The news megathread has always been under more relaxed rules than the rest of the comm (e.g. if somebody like LargePenis starts talking about Iran in the 1980s, we aren’t going to be like “Erm, this breaks the rules and has to be removed, acktually”, whereas a post in the news comm about that same thing would probably get redirected to a different comm). And besides, those kinds of effortposts are almost always in relation to ongoing events and providing context. It’s basically never happened that somebody’s come here with a big essay on like, the War of the Roses or some old thing entirely unrelated to recent events, it’s just not an issue that we have to moderate. When somebody comes across a post that’s like 6 months old on idk, an understudied facet of events in Gaza, and then posts it here, it’s still very relevant analysis even if it isn’t news.

So we don’t anticipate having to be terribly more strict inside this megathread about “old news”. Things should not change much at all, in here at least.

we can just see what the DOD itself is thinking:

Even assuming that some US refineries can switch over to producing jet fuel (which will raise consumer gas prices presumably), with the recent severe damage to that refueling ship in the Middle East (and how there’s really not that many of them), physically getting the fuel to the ships and aircraft may prove pretty challenging. I think many of us here have been concluding over the past couple years that the US would have a short period of intense activity (say, a month or two) and then logistical realities would force them to back down, and China is extremely unlikely to be toppled in a couple months in the event of a war over Taiwan. While China probably has the ability to do a massive naval invasion of Taiwan and end the conflict in months (at the cost of many thousands of soldiers’ lives), if they’ve been paying attention to Ukraine, then I feel like they’d opt for an attrition war instead. Much safer and uses their advantages (state control of colossal amounts of factories and production which could supply a war for decades if need be) against the US’s weaknesses, their inability to fight a war of attrition.

MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY?

now we’re really bikeshedding

I think it’s something that’s increasingly true as time has gone by.

As in, it started as “not at all true and if anything actively benefits the country doing the genocide” in the period of European colonial expansion (1492 to ~1900). But from that point onwards, when the concept and material basis of national identity was spreading from the imperial core to the frontier (as capital was exported abroad and development meant that revolutionaries could obtain weapons and means of agitating), the genocides began to produce the opposite effects and generated resentment against their ruling regimes which would then fuel liberation movements. Not necessarily immediately, sometimes populations were cowed, but the children of those affected would learn of what happened from their parents and by that point, colonial domination would yet again be weaker and development had yet again continued, so they’d try again. And again and again until colonialism had perished.

Israel is the last major holdout but the process has continued: from a place of fighting with a big disadvantage initially decades ago, you can now see just how ideologically principled the Resistance is and how they actually have, if not technological parity, then definitely effective destructive parity with Israel. As in, Israel can bomb a shitload of civilians, but in terms of military targets, Hezbollah’s tunnel metropolises mean that Israel is at a substantial disadvantage in hitting Hezbollah soldiers (whereas Hezbollah can strike at Israeli bases with much less difficulty). The battlefield has been levelled, so to speak, between the imperial core and the developing world. Both because of the aforementioned historical processes and also because neoliberalism is crippling the productive capacity of the imperial core. So in this situation, yes, genocides do mean suicide, because they can’t just do the equivalent of marching in with their Maxim guns into Zulu territory and murdering thousands of people; now, the Zulus also have Maxim guns.

Amal Saad, scholar of Hezbollah:

We have to stop calling Israel’s current military-security-terrorist campaign against Lebanon an escalation and start calling it a war. Not total war without ceilings yet, but war, nonetheless. Israel’s “shock and awe” offensive pursues short term tactical gains to make up for its strategic losses, while Hizbullah is aiming for longer term strategic objectives despite some tactical losses it has endured over the past week.

Israel’s “fleeing forward” strategy comes with several unrealistic objectives, none of which are likely to be achieved:

• pushing Hizbullah to retreat from the border and end its support front with Gaza
• expel and displace people from South Lebanon to potentially use as a bargaining chip to return settlers to the North
• demoralise and break the resolve of Resistance fighters and the Resistance community
• significantly degrade Hizbullah’s military capabilities

The farcical claim that Lebanese households are harbouring cruise missiles is such a transparently absurd, lazy and crudely constructed Israeli fabrication that it appears to serve no purpose beyond being a tactic of blackmail to pressure Hizbullah into capitulating to Israel’s demands. Thus, when Israel claimed today that it struck a record 1,600+ “Hizbullah sites, mostly weapons stored within homes,” yesterday, this was an admission that it had surgically killed and displaced over 1600 families.

Since Israel’s mass terrorist offensive last Tuesday, Hizbullah’s strategy has been to escalate both horizontally, by widening the scope of attacks across Israel, and vertically, through intensified strikes and the introduction of new weapons, while holding back its advanced missiles for now. In doing so, it has extended the de facto security zone it established in northern Israel, reaching as far as Haifa, and increasing the number of displaced Israelis from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.

Hizbullah has limited its strikes to key strategic military targets, such as military installations and weapons factories, avoiding civilian targets and infrastructure, even as Israel persists in committing war crimes against Lebanese civilians. While Israel’s approach has been one of displacement and massacre, Hizbullah’s strategy has focused on displacement and paralysis. Its Resistance forces aim to weaken the IDF’s resolve and erode the resilience of Israel’s home front through a strategy of combined military and economic attrition. Whether or not Hizbullah will escalate further by targeting civilian objects in Israel and risk unleashing Israel’s firepower against Beirut remains to be seen. This decision will likely depend on Hizbullah’s perception of a strategic need to retaliate rather than a desire for vengeance.

Hizbullah’s ability to rebound from the pager attacks and the assassination of its senior commanders is a testament to its operational capability and its resilience in absorbing shocks to its command-and-control structure. Should Israel attempt a ground invasion of South Lebanon to create a buffer zone, Hizbullah will welcome it, as Nasrallah stated in his recent speech. This is where Hizbullah’s true strength lies: in close combat and preventing occupations. IDF troops would become sitting ducks for the Resistance’s advanced hybrid warfare tactics.

Hezbollah fighters also continue to retaliate by shelling Israeli territory: more than 100 rockets were fired in the morning. Most of them were either intercepted by Israeli air defense systems or fell in open areas. Only a small number of projectiles managed to fall within the boundaries of populated areas, causing minor damage.

I’m not quite sure if Rybar understands what military censorship is.

“As we can clearly see, our enemies have incredibly bad aim and aren’t hitting the parts of our planes (Israeli military structure) that cause them to be destroyed. Every plane (video/photograph) that we’ve ever seen return to us is like this, proving that their attacks are ineffective. Very discouraging for them.”

A US Navy replenishment ship sustained damage while operating in the Middle East in an incident that remains under investigation, according to a Navy official.

The USNS Big Horn was damaged after the ship refueled and replenished Navy vessels operating in the region, including the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and several guided-missile destroyers. The Navy official would not say where the incident occurred or what type of damage the replenishment oiler sustained.

lol

Pezeshkian just did an interview with CNN and said: Hezbullah can’t stand against Israel on its own.

this wasn’t true in 2006 and it’s infinitely less true in 2024

unless the argument is that the Resistance as a whole can stand against Israel but not Hezbollah alone, but even that might not really be true as AFAIK Hezbollah has internal missile/drone production

defending Tel Aviv like Berlin and the the Reichstag

This would almost certainly never happen because their respective forces aren’t really built for this, but I smile at the idea of Hamas marching in from the south, West Bank forces from the east, and Hezbollah from the north to enter Tel Aviv, and the Palestinian flag flying over the Knesset like that famous image of the communist flag over the Reichstag

It’s time to finalize a Ukraine-Russia ceasefire deal in which the government in Russia is overthrow and replaced by somebody who is aligned with American aims, which is definitely not indistinguishable from a surrender

Thank fucking god that Syria isn’t a nation led by a comprador shithead and is allowing Lebanese refugees in via border crossings. Incredibly difficult situation for Assad given the state that Syria was already in, massive respect for not hesitating. Hoping that Iran and friends can get enough food in to the refugees to prevent the famine we’re seeing in Gaza, as the numbers of displaced might reach the hundreds of thousands by the end of this war. Now would be a good time for Russia to help things out with its big agricultural sector, for example.

I vote for the one you want

at this rate, give it a few days and we’ll have a bunch of cheering at footage of blown-up Merkavas invading Lebanon

“golly gee, I gave it the ol’ college try”

From Israel’s POV: Hezbollah picked a really bad moment to move all of their missiles out of their secure storage facilities deep underground and place them in easily destroyable civilian homes (??? even this propaganda seems too unbelievable but westerners would lick the dogshit off a Zionist’s boots with zero hesitation), so we exploited that, but we therefore were forced to, accidentally, kill 500 civilians in a single day, but also they were all Hamas anyway. I mean, all Hezbollah. Yeah.

From Hezbollah’s POV: Time to go hunting for Zionists! We’ve been preparing for this war for the better part of two decades!

Israel is on the cusp of ending their state in an apocalyptic war (as soon as they commit forces into Lebanon) and they’ll make absolutely sure to murder as many people on the way out as possible.