I know the Rambo title card is a hoax.
The COTW was chosen in the wake of the aborted sequel to the attempted assassination of Trump being performed by a guy who is VERY enthusiastic about Ukraine, to the point of trying to sneak Afghan soldiers into Ukraine by setting up a house in Pakistan to house them and then further transport them. He also apparently offered to send thousands of Afghan soldiers to Haiti to help them combat gang violence. Whomst among us doesn't have the numbers of thousands of Afghan soldiers on speed-dial. Do you reckon there's a group chat?
Anyway, while there is still no official recognition of the Taliban's government by any country, China has taken a different course than the late USSR and the US - forming economic in-roads, rather than trying their own invasion. This has been a big boon for the struggling country, with various mines and oil and agriculture deals helping keep things barely afloat. A total disintegration of the social fabric of Afghanistan is not in the interest of any of the powers that border it - China, Pakistan, and Iran, with Russia not too far away - so an interesting dynamic of helping-without-official-recognition has been established. I wonder who will be the first country to fully recognize them?
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Afghanistan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Говорит Шестиугольный Медведь!Сообщение Совинформбюро!Модераторы 1-го Международного информационного фронта под командованием фельдмаршала Советского Союза 72 трлн при поддержке 1-го Украинского информационного фронта под командованием фельдмаршала Советского Союза Карпа Правда завершила уничтожение мировой группы Лемми фашистских войск после упорных уличных боев!А сегодня, 17 сентября, они полностью захватили столицу нацистского мира Лемми, город Лэнгли, штат Вирджиния!Центр империализма Лемми и центр агрессии Лемми.Hi, I'm here to announce that Hexbear's News Comm is going to be changing the rules of the comm in order to better modernize rules that haven't been changed since the founding of hexbear or have been added slap-shod in the heat of the moment to address pressing issues of the day.
With that in mind, we of the News Comm mod team have decided to add an element of democracy to the process of modernizing the comm's rules by opening the floor to the participants of the comm to both propose new rules, edit or strike old rules, and after deliberation by the mod team, voting yea or nay on the finalized slate.
If you wish to participate by making proposals, please make a comment in reply to this pinned comment with your proposed motion. For your proposed motion to move to deliberation by the mod team, we'll be requiring a minimum floor of 21 votes (20 unique votes plus your own comment's initial vote).
An example of this could be "Proposal to editing the old rule 4 on twitter links from nitter.com to xcancel or any other twitter mirror that does not require an account, while also striking the section referring to the firefox extension, making it
End proposal"
Proposals that meet the minimum required votes will be brought to the floor in a private chamber for deliberation by the mod team and proposals will be discussed, edited should minor adjustments be needed, and finally voted upon to accept it as a part of the final draft or to table it from discussion. (by the way we called the chatroom we're gonna be chattering about all your ideas "The Central Committee of the news mega" You can either be jealous or mirthful of the level of Larping we're doing for this event)
After a set amount of time for accepting new proposals, discussing, and voting upon them, we'll do another one of these pinned comments presenting each accepted proposed rule for a simple thumbs up-thumbs down vote. After a set period of voting, we'll confirm the results and edit the Comm rules to reflect the new changes. (The voting system will look like Comment with proposal and two reply comments with a silly emoji and text saying "Yea" and "Nay")
Alright my little war piggies, its time to run wild!
i don't have any proposals (i'd personally prefer if there were fewer navel-gazing meta posts --i don't need to read 100 comments about how there are 100 comments), but i'd just like to reiterate, the news mega is the biggest value-add of the site, and i hope whatever changes are made are consistent with its current character.
I second the rule "no comments about comment numbers or top level comments about 'weeks where decades..'"
(but I think first posting should be protected)
New rule proposal:
No low-effort top-level comments that consist only of wishing for things.
This is probably phrased poorly but I think comments like “if I were Iran I would simply start WWIII” or
should be in the replies. Fantasy geopolitics games people play in their heads isn’t news related imo.
More developed opinions/analysis in the vein of “Iran should strike x facility because it would critically damage the Zionist entity” should be allowed though.
Should add archive.org as an archiving option because archive.ph blocks VPNs with annoying captchas
I second this
Honestly have no idea what's going on lol
Thoughts. The mega-war comments were kinda cringe (esp vis a vis trans mega although I don’t think there was bad intent, hope not) and I wished people self policed more. (Not shaming anyone, bandwagons happen and now it’s corrected.) It seems these comments have been minimized and I appreciate the mod work on this. I don’t think it’s an issue anymore.
The “innocent” OT (and “oops wrong mega”) I appreciate as long as there are not too many.
The news mega is a community and sometimes I have an issue or topic that I’d like feedback and engagement on from my news comrades here. This is a common phenomenon across special interest groups, you become friendly and wish to expand the range of conversation or you wish to tap the knowledge base. (I suppose my saying this could be interpreted as a reason for More Moderation in news mega to ensure that other comms get love. It’s not my call.) Maybe a pinned comment to contain OT? Did someone else suggest that? Or what if we make a post in another targeted comm and leave a pointer here in the news mega. I’ve pointed to a news comm story in the news mega - and got positive feedback from a couple who had missed it.
Re doomer stuff. Let people vent, and use the reply. We all learn and so will the libs who wander in.
On this, personally I am a lot more tolerant of off topic or only tangentially on topic material from people who regularly contribute on topic material to the threads compared to randoms. @LargePenis@hexbear.net is a good example - he posts some OT stuff but he also brings his A game talking about Lebanon and Syria.
I always thought the mega-war comments were fun and lighthearted
You're not wrong, it's just that they were becoming a little too frequent and generated nothing useful, when I think most people come here to gain information and not so much to have fun and shoot the shit
I want to to prose a rule for no defeatism? and also for "nothing ever happens" stuff? I dunno how to word that properly for the best so if someone knows how to word it better? but it is really annoying seeing others saying nothing ever happens, when things are always happening, and trivializing things as if all of this is entertainment. Then there the defeatist side of stuff to where I understand the grief that comes from these things, but to say everything is all over isn't right. It's also very disrespectful to, like for example, towards everything the axis of resistance has done
the news mega should try to provide clear-eyed and varied analysis; to insist that everything is going to plan, and to restrict posts to only those that take an optimistic-spin on world events, would be QAnon-esque cope, imho.
A little defeatism is good for discussion. Denouncing defeatism can really be uplifting. Having doubts is fair and rational. If you don't voice your fears how are your comrades supposed to help you see that your fears are unfounded?
"nothing ever happens" bugs me because the idea is founded in western chauvinist comfort. "nothing ever happens to me" while every day there is another massacre in Palestine.
"Nothing ever happens" is undialectical. The dialectic is ever in motion. What seems like nothing happening is actually contradictions pushing against each other towards a temporary equilibrium, but one contradiction will eventually overcome the other.
This you?
"Vibes-based" indeed
We are the PPB (Putin Posting Brigade)
My only ~~problem~~ concern with this is that defeatism is extremely subjective. Every NAFO shithole on the Internet strictly moderates "defeatism" and the end result is a perspective completely detached from reality. On here, people will make shitposts (e.g. a day or two after the occupation of Kursk, someone was like "has anybody told Putin about this yet") and people will get really bent out of shape over inconsequential banter.
I think, foremost, we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously. Whether we are blooming or dooming, it is not like the Axis of Resistance is loading up Hexbear dot net every day and taking cues from our big brain analysis. The Russian MOD isn't reading our shitposts to decide where to commit their resources. The soldiers of Hezbollah and Ansarallah are not going to be deterred from the righteous path because a handful of westoids are suddenly feeling uneasy. BRICS isn't going to unravel just because there are skeptics of dedollarization among us.
We should deter outright panic, but this is a news discussion forum and let me tell ya, most of the news is bad.
The global workers movement has already been defeated. We are only now, two generations later, beginning to claw our way out of the tomb we were buried in at the end of the cold war, and there are still many setbacks ahead of us.
can we at least agree to remove top level comments like this:
This is pretty cut and dry defeatism, without adding any type of factual analysis.
Yeah, there are a handful of egregious examples like this. Even this comment though, has the potential for some fruitful analysis if it weren't such a low effort throwaway.
You could make this argument. The Lebanese Republic is deeply dysfunctional and probably moribund, with or without Israeli intervention, whereas "Israel," even at the bottom of the deepest crisis in its history, with the overwhelming support of the US and it's lousy dogs, has already survived long past its expiration date.
But there are a lot more details to the way this will play out than the picture this poster is painting. The weakness of the Lebanese state is a significant factor in why Hezbollah is able to take matters into their own hands in the first place. Considering Hezbollah is significantly more powerful than the Lebanese army, and politically more coherent (in the literal sense) than the Republic, whatever happens to the government in Beirut seems kind of immaterial as far as "Israel" achieving its objectives goes. They aren't going to just march north and expand "Greater Israel." They are going to face intense resistance, in greater numbers, with greater armaments than they have in Gaza, which they still haven't managed to pacify.
So yeah, the "state of Israel" very well might outlive the state of Lebanon, but so will Hezbollah, so what changes exactly?
I would not be surprised if this user doesn’t realize Hezbollah and the Lebanese government are different entities. The commonality in these overly broad doom prophecies is a lack of granular detailed knowledge.
I don't believe in the "nothing ever happens" nonsense, things change.
But I look at 2014 headlines on Israeli crimes in Gaza, it's the same shit repeating at a larger scale.
Don’t read anything from the 20th century on Palestine because it’s the same thing all the way down
Do that as you like, but I don't want to rely on individuals ruggedly bootstrapping their block system to make this community usable
I think we should only ban racist comments, posters that frequently misgender others, and spam posts.
I don't want this place to become an echo chamber. If someone makes debunked or blatantly bigoted idea posts (example I saw here: "native Americans should let bygones be bygones so we can build socialism") we should be able to have them banned on a case by case basis.
I like the news mega as it is. I don't feel a need for more rules.
People here are nice. A little bit of goofing off is okay, and I don't think there are too many low effort posts.
The mods are doing a fine job already.
Seriously, this all just seems pretty unnecessary
Frankly any time there's discussions on this site about rules and moderation changing it just spirals into negativity and witch hunting
Any top level comment that isn't a news article or in some way an effort post (doesnt have to be expansive but shouldn't just be a short, personal reaction about an event) should be removed. Totally fine as replies to a higher level comment, but having the top level comments retain higher quality would be incredibly nice.
What is the purpose of specially marking opeds like this? What does this gain over just posting them like everything else?
personally, besides a few dramaticisms and other oddities from the general site culture that show up from time to time, this place is fine as it is, developing too many restrictions might lead to another dunk/dredge tank-style unnecessary split or whatever.
New rule proposal: only I can make "First" comments.
Ban persistent doom posters, shit is thicker here than on reddit. Get a grip people.
I would go against banning anything that isn't already against the rules. Some comments happen in years. In other weeks comments happen where words occur. In other words days happen where comments annoy someone but it's all in good spirit