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.
A lot of rumours going around that the pager attack was indiscriminate and that it was 5000 pagers? Any confirmation of this anywhere that could be lib-friendly?
EDIT: Also if you have a phone, walkie talkie or pager it might be worth opening it up and giving it an inspection for anything that weighs 20grams that looks out of place. I assume it will likely be touching the battery as it requires heat as the trigger mechanism. The explosives used in these devices were 20grams of PETN.
EDITEDIT: Another thing I'm not understanding is how the trigger mechanism works actually. The temperature detonation point of PETN is 4230°C
EDITEDITEDIT: My guess is they are connected to the circuit. So there must be electronics added too. The energy needed for direct initiation by electric spark is 10-60 mJ.
EDIT4: Another question that needs answering is how the trigger was delivered to devices simultaneously. If the devices were triggered via the pager's own network transmissions then the pagers that are turned off would not have exploded, meaning there's tonnes of unexploded ones out there. However it might also have electronics added that are independent of this and pagers that were off may have also exploded. I suspect this is the most reliable explanation.
There are reports from otherwise reliable accounts on Resistance Twitter of various other devices exploding in Lebanon. If these reports are true, this means that the trigger mechanism is independent of the device the rigged batteries are installed in.
Right but I need news articles or the like.
Right now the prevailing message people are getting is that this was targeted and only hit hezbollah members, when what it actually sounds like is that this was an indiscriminate attack against anyone using a batch of pagers that israel managed to fill with bombs. I'd like to contribute to cutting into that narrative but am failing to find suitable reporting.
The closest I could find is something like this:
https://xcancel.com/BBCWorld/status/1836119106811990301
Even though the BBC purposefully refuse to connect the dots, you can see how:
The attack took place at a public supermarket and not at a Hezbollah rally or Hezbollah militant funeral, meaning the vast majority of people are not affiliated with Hezbollah.
You can see how a random bystander could get injured. Imagine if the dude stood like a foot closer to where the pager was or if the little girls near the orange fruit at the top middle switched places with the dude.
The BBC itself admits that the pagers were detonated simultaneously, meaning this wasn't Mossad making a mistake and detonating the pager before the old man got to his car. It was a simultaneous detonation of multiple devices, meaning there was no concern over collateral damage or even awareness whether they actually got the alleged Hezbollah member.
I mean let's assume the shipment was specifically to Hezbollah, then Hezbollah presumably would be handing these out only to their own members and people they need to be in contact with, like that Iranian ambassador.
This is not the case though. It's simply a shipment to Lebanon that Israel filled with bombs. The whole "they're all hezbollah" shit is identical to the "everyone is hamas" shit Israel have always pulled. Children were injured and died in this attack.
Maybe? We don't know that? You'd expect children to get hurt and killed even if literally everyone with the pager was Hezbollah, since Hezbollah members would wear them more-or-less all the time, even with children right next to them.
This is a terror attack either way, bombing people in their home while not engaged in fighting is some sort of violation even by liberal international law standards.
children, doctors, emts, medical staff of all sorts, government workers, etc
Yes, it's a thing called propaganda. You can find counter narratives on telegram. It was a terrorist attack on civilians.
This is just my unqualified opinion, but from a practical standpoint of both pulling it off and not looking obvious, it would be whole lot easier to use the existing radio and hardware, together with manipulated firmware to explode these things. You'd have to put a whole second set of electronics in there otherwise, which would possibly look sus. I don't know also why Israel would care if some of them didn't go off when they are not in use.
Then about the explosives. If you wanted to hide the explosives, you might package them with the battery. That way, from the outside, it just looks like a chunky battery, and people are unlikely to open up the battery because it's dangerous. It would be interesting to have a look at a battery from this type of pager. Batteries in laptops and phones actually already have electronics in the battery package, with digital data pins so you can talk to the battery and ask it about its state and whatnot. You could therefore produce a battery w/ explosives including a detonator which looked like a normal battery, and it could be triggered over the regular battery connector. You wouldn't see anything, not even extra wires, unless you opened up the battery itself.
This sounds like the most practical method. All you have to do is swap out the battery that was supposed to go in the device with your bomb battery. It won't be possible to tell by inspecting it.
And manipulate the firmware obviously.
*have to use x-rays to inspect it
*if one were in sicko mode, one could make plastic molds from some explosives, so realistically one has to do randomised tryouts from shipments (by fire)
*one can imagine what kind of backdoors nsa puts in
Don't even know about X-rays, there's like copper foil in the batteries. Some batteries come wrapped up in an aluminium also.
Copper foil is not leaded brick, airport scanners shoot through them. And in any case, weird construction would be obvious from the look.
(im leaving more esoteric scanning methods which also exist)
Some of these must have been through airports already though and not been noticed by the security.
Because airport security is a joke. I mean would you look for unusually looking tiny battery, in a small pager packed in a giant suitcase?
(honestly here something like ai would be poggers)
I thought like this too, but there are apparently reports of other devices going off. This would mean the method of detonation is (mostly) device independent.
I've seen reports that non-wireless devices are going off and then counter-reports that they aren't going off, only the wireless ones are, and that was just misinformation to spread fear