SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
“Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be followed by surreal continuity as the old order cadaverously fights back.”
I don’t personally know the distribution of Hezbollah’s tunnels but I imagine we’d see a Gaza-esque situation where it doesn’t matter militarily what happens to the buildings above ground, and if anything destroyed buildings are a more chaotic and difficult environment for anti-guerrilla urban warfare
and it’s obvious that Israel has learned and internalized nothing from their warfare in Gaza or they’d have, y’know, results
Area (and especially volume) are one of those numbers where it’s really easy to see a big number and go “oh shit” but then you look for comparisons and realize that we’re talking about nothing.
For a comparison every true newshead will understand: Israel has so far taken an area half the size of Mariupol on a front that is about 80 kilometers (50 miles) long, against a force that isn’t even designed to hold territory in a conventional sense (trenches and dragon’s teeth and such).
As Hezbollah have stated (there’s a comment elsewhere in the thread about this), in previous wars Israel was basically unstoppable in terms of territorial advancement, taking towns and villages miles and miles into Lebanon within hours and days, but now Hezbollah is strong enough to stop them taking border villages after a month. So when I was talking a couple months ago how we shouldn’t panic if Israel makes rapid gains because it’s just part of how guerrilla warfare is, and that Hezbollah is orders of magnitude stronger now than they were back then, I was still underestimating Hezbollah’s strength.
denial of LTV is where the whole “paying somebody to dig a ditch and then fill it back in again is a refutation of Marx because there’s no value created there and yet labor was done” thing comes from, which is really a sign that these people haven’t read a single word of Marx
As another moderator, I’d just like to piggyback this comment and talk about this.
First, what is (hopefully) the least objectionable part: the creation of c/counterpropaganda. It does have some degree of overlap with c/effort and c/agitprop, but I envision it as a place for stockpiling useful counterarguments and framing devices for use against liberals, whether that be online or when talking to friends and family, where c/agitprop is about creating spreadable images and memes. I might end up posting things from citationsneeded in there. That being said, I wasn’t the one who came up with the idea of the comm, and how it’ll actually evolve remains to be seen.
While I also did not come up with it, the naming of c/gossip was made intentionally frivolous because what X streamer is saying today is fairly unimportant. In fact, there was an idea that naming it c/gossip would help ferret out people who were like “I’m not doing gossip, that’s feminine! I’m a very serious politics understander who is talking about the very important issue of what neo-Nazi shit [streamer] has said today!” I would be fine with a name change (and tried to come up with some in the mod chat but couldn’t really find something in the same vein) but the fundamental idea of what it should be is fine in my eyes - if you like discussing what a shitty public figure is doing then you can do that there, and those that don’t want to do so can block the comm.
The reason behind locking the dunk/dredge tanks is, as stated above, due to concerns about the impact of things like toxicity and irony poisoning leading to chauvinism and bigotry, even if it’s accidental. Dunking is not, in my personal view, inherently bad. It is one tool in the toolkit. The ability to dismiss an idea without effort, using all the lovely techniques in the Logical Fallacy diagram, is awesome for when libs and chuds come along with ideas that have been debunked and dismissed for tens if not hundreds of years. It’s also a great way to build a community, as chapotraphouse’s (albeit terminated) existence demonstrated. Many of us came to chapotraphouse or to Hexbear directly either through being dunked on, or by seeing somebody else get dunked on, and seeing that there are indeed people who have some real passion about politics who aren’t seal-clapping chuds. I personally object to an attempt to just stamp out dunking, at least as it’s defined as “refusing to take a person or idea seriously and instead insulting them” (what would be the alternative - a hundred lemmy bots that each respond with a 10-paragraph argument that you could summon for every eventuality?)
However, we’ve seen complaints from people about how the vestiges of reddit that remain here are turning off people, particularly non-white and non-cis-male people. There’s just a zeitgeist of masculinity and reddit background radiation that people can detect and they then choose to go elsewhere, and we should do everything within reason to try and make the site more appealing to those people. Mandatory pronouns was a great initial step in that direction, but we must continue down the path. We have black and/or LGBTQIA+ moderators who are trying hard to fix these issues. I am neither of those, so I’ve largely gone with their expertise on the matter.
Is Hexbear a serious political platform? Is it a bar where you hang out after work with your friends and shoot the shit? It is both and neither. But it can definitely be better.
he didn’t literally say it but when a democrat starts talking about how we need to fellate institutions merely for being institutions, instead of talking about how food prices need to go back to how they were before, then that’s essentially campaigning on “nothing will fundamentally change”, whether it’s said outright or behind closed doors. that was the point I was trying to make, not that I thought Biden was literally going behind a podium and saying “well, we’ve got nothing to really improve here from Trump, we’re gonna do the same stuff he did” (even if that was indeed his actual policies), of course he was going to lie about policies
Great post. The average American is so replete in contradictory positions that it’s hard to nail down exactly how many more votes Harris would have gotten if she had done XYZ but seeing people (including Hasan, whose electoral coverage I watched over the night to keep me awake if anything else) point out that the issues that the media finds important are NOT the same as the ones that people find important was an eye-opener for me. Like with his example that Harris’ initial policy of punishing grocery store price-gouging was very popular and only became MORE popular despite the Republicans and right-leaning Democrats pumping out propaganda about how the mildest price caps so poor people can afford to eat would be 1984 communist Venezuela Soviet totalitarianism China dictatorship hyperinflation.
I’ve expressed over the years my “observation” (which probably unknowingly draws from some French philosophers that I haven’t gotten around to reading) that Western and especially American politics is this cultural miasma that is disconnected from the rest of the world and material reality, with Atlas carrying this abstracted-away propaganda reality on his shoulders, which explains why despite bettering of material conditions ought to poll well (and often does), a massive minority or perhaps even majority of Americans just cannot be persuaded to give a shit. It’s like the political version of how the stock market literally does not reflect anything anymore, every single oil refinery on the planet could implode in one hour and the oil markets would budge by like, 5%, and then correct themselves and go back to normal. Japan had a massive single-day crash semi-recently and then it just got back up if as nothing happened because it wasn’t connected to anything, it was just a psychological thing or some rich guys trying to make money or whatever happened there.
But now I’m beginning to think that actually, I’m the idiot and this political disconnection never truly existed and I was being propagandized and brainwashed by the media to think that Americans just don’t give a shit, when clearly, millions really do! Biden being this absolute dogshit candidate even back in 2020 getting the most votes ever while campaigning on “nothing will fundamentally change” broke my brain and I believed the media when they said that those two facts were connected, when it doesn’t actually seem to have been because Harris was even more “nothing will fundamentally change” and now the Republicans won the fucking popular vote! So I’m glad you’ve more eloquently expressed this nascent thought. I really ought to have connected the dots better because I go on and on about how Day’s hypothesis of brainwashing not being real but for some reason it was a huge blind spot for me. The spectacle of the voteball consumed my critical thinking; the owl of minerva flies at dusk.
they decided they were going to go and vandalise peoples homes, steal and burn pro-Palestinian flags, shout racist slogans, and attack mostly Morooccan taxi drivers.
In a silver lining though, most of them got their shit kicked in by the locals
if I had a nickel for every time that Zionists have gone into a place where they are very unwelcome, been racist and violent, and then got fucking owned, I’d have… quite a lot of nickels actually, in the last year alone
yeah, the destruction is very mutually assured, it’s basically a) whether the US thinks that taking down Iran for a decade or two while it rebuilds (certainly with the help of China and friends) is worth the destruction of the last century of empire-building in the Middle East, and perhaps even more importantly b) whether it’s even up for the US and Israel to decide anymore, if Iran feels sufficiently emboldened to strike first or if Israel thinks that it’s 100% going down if they don’t fight Iran and just die to a thousand cuts and there’s a 97% chance that they go down if they do fight Iran, so might as well take the second option
