There's what, 30k of these guys? How the fuck are these jihadi hicks going to control Damascus let alone the whole of Syria? I don't think HTS is going to be able to pull it off, no matter how much everyone there just wants the war to be over.

I'm wondering if Israel might try to set up some kind of Druze protectorate in Southern Syria. That bulge along the border corresponds to one of the Druze-inhabited regions.

The main region around As Suwayda, however, is quite a bit farther to the East and would require occupying a pretty large inhabited area of southern Syria with maybe as many as 500k non-Druze Muslim inhabitants. I don't know if Israel could handle that kind of operation with everything they have on their plate right now even if the new government in Damascus is cooperative. If they did pull it off it would be a permanent wedge between Syria and the inhabited areas of Jordan, also cutting off Syria from Southern Lebanon (this has been accomplished already).

The below map was already floating around Twitter three days ago.

So a few questions about what is happening with this sudden offensive by the rebels.

The most proximate change in the geopolitical environment was the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. What is the connection here? Presumably Israel doesn't need to use the ceasefire to support such an attack, certainly this would have been even more useful to them while fighting was going on in Lebanon. Because so much of this is going through Turkey, the US must be involved as well.

There's clearly some kind of behind-the-scenes dealing going on whether it's between Hezbollah, Israel, Turkey, the US (Biden people or incoming Trump people). It's hard to figure out exactly what the angle is and I've been puzzling over it all week. Is this a quid pro quo from Washington for the ceasefire? Is this Biden's foreign policy people throwing together one last hurrah for their Syrian proxies before Trump comes in and winds up the whole operation? Is there a Russia angle?

Florida Republican politics really is just a branch of organized crime isn't it?

At least he didn't have a vision where he learned he was Jesus' little brother, so many more could have died...

You can do Windows, sometimes you've gotta do Windows, but I highly recommend learning Linux. Just get a dual boot or a different drive running linux and set up something that works for what you need. If you're just doing general office work and some gaming Linux will do what you need. If you want to play a few specific games that don't work or need Adobe or Solidworks for work you'll need windows. It can be virtualized though!

He's not a good politician, but I have no reason to doubt he's relatively intelligent and ambitious. He'll bring the most brain-dead careerist Bush administration-era State Department officers to the fore. They'll turn the place into even more of an ideological concentration camp, where realist thought is severely punished, and cynical careerist backstabbing is the only driving force. It's going to be a wild ride. They'll probably start several wars in the next four years, and we're going to be stuck in conflict like Russia or Israel for the next decade based on the petty politics of these fools. It'll be the end of the empire though, and if they make things bad enough soon enough, we'll never be able to dream of starting a war with China.

Trump's appointments are all over the place. He's trying to set up his typical court, playing all the minions against each other to give himself the maximum number of opportunities to control things. Some rightwing neocon freak could come out of nowhere to dominate the administration's policy by playing this court better than Trump himself can, and Trump is busy marginalizing anyone he thinks is competent enough to challenge his power. They're absolutely speedrunning imperial decadence..

She's not cool actually. She's basically in thrall to this weird Indian-American Hindu cult out of Hawaii that her parents are wrapped up in. It seems like some kind of messy op. Absolutely bonkers that she'd get any serious intelligence position. My guess is some of these appointments are getting thrown out as a negotiating tactic with Republican senators. Trump's saying OK, you can reject my cranks, but you'll need to approve X psycho neocon ghoul in exchange.

I don't think you appreciate how fucking crazy this is. The Trump administration is going to be a mess. We can hope the more sane positions emerge from the chaos, but it's not like the evil that does get done is going to be focused or coherent. To the extent that left signaling is important in US politics, we should probably focus on undermining the neolib forces who will be insisting Trump is bad because he's doing imperialism wrong.

Hard not to come to this conclusion tbh

Now that the original line in the Southwest part of Donetsk has fallen, the Russians have a straight shot right to the Zaporizhia Oblast border, all flat fields with 0 obstacles until Ivanivka, basically everything south of that green line is super vulnerable, putting the Russians in position to threaten to roll up the lines either to the West or the North. Logistics for a major offensive might be tough due to limited good roads, but we might be looking at the return of big arrows soon and maybe a precipitous collapse of Ukrainian lines, especially if the Russians are actually already in Kostyantynopil. We'll see if they're prepared to exploit their successes further. It's hard to be optimistic watching this war, but this is the kind of action that might bring it to a more rapid close.

They didn't even have the balls to send manned vessels there, they sent in this wimpy slow-ass USV and the Yemenis just chased it down and grabbed it. Now Yemen's got the goods on whatever this probably billion-dollar project is.

They wanted to prove he was dead. Did they think Hamas will respond like the Nazis defending Berlin when Hitler died? Let's hope Netanyahu tries to use this as an excuse to wrap things up in Gaza to focus on Hezbollah.

Meanwhile China has reached the cutting edge of microprocessor fabrication science and is planning a superfab utilizing a particle accelerator to try to get down to 2nm. Was this maybe coming eventually anyway? Sure, but I think these sanctions have made the Chinese double-down. They might have temporarily lost some market share by not being able to scale as fast at the cutting edge for the last few years, but these sanctions forced them to move up the supply chain to the kind of fabrication technology ASML had been supplying before sanctions and now they will outcompete the western monopolists. They wanted a quick fix to keep the Chinese behind in semiconductors for another decade, but no one thought to ask, "Well what happens after that? How will the Chinese respond?"

If things really do heat up there it's a clear tell Taiwan is about to pop off imo. Light too many fires for the empire to put out and there's no way they'll be able to square up with the world's dominant industrial power.

That said, I don't think Korea is going to heat up too much. There have been much more siginificant flare-ups in the past.

It doesn't even look big. What's the point of all that space if you're not showing it off?

Another option for Iran would be to try to crater the runways after the strike, maybe combine it with one of those slow drone wave attacks to get as much of the Israeli airforce in the air as possible. These missions are at the absolute limit of F-35's range, even if you don't force the planes to ditch you can force them to air fields that can't support them and get them out of action for a few days. There's a lot you can do to an air force if you can strike their air bases.

If I'm in the Iranian war room I'm pounding my fist on the table right now demanding a pre-emptive strike. They just hit the airbases they're going to have to launch an attack from, roll out some missiles and hit them again when the aircraft are fueling up and getting ready to go. Then follow it up with a wave of those drones once their air assets are indisposed. That's how you do deterrence and shut down the escalation ladder.

Honestly this debate probably slightly hurts Kamala, just by virtue of people having to watch her more. She didn't do a great job of rebutting Trump. Her response to him just lying his ass off the whole time just wasn't sharp enough, and there was so little substance in her responses - it's just not going to move the needle for anyone. My lib boyfriend just gave up watching it after 30 minutes or so and was laughing at Trump half the time. It just made me depressed and less interested in giving a fuck about this election.