extremely upsetting that this isn't a headline from like 1949

But presumably there are professional military folks on the IOF who can understand the costs and risks and know it’s suicidal go after Hezbollah.

there absolutely are - this is why Israel hasn't tried to go really hard on Hezbollah or Lebanon for the last 8 months. not out of the kindness of their hearts, they would love to reduce every structure in southern Lebanon to rubble, but they know they cannot without facing huge reprisals. the only reason they might go for it soon is because they're running out of options given that a) peace in Gaza is completely politically untenable; there isn't a single person within 20 miles of power who wants to allow even a single Gazan to be alive after this war, which therefore means b) that Hezbollah will remain true to its word and will not go for a separate peace with Israel or its entire raison d'etre as an organization (resistance to Israeli imperialism) ceases to exist. if peace is impossible, war is inevitable unless there is an internal collapse in Israel before then, but while there are encouraging signs of incoming collapse, I fail to see what will be dealing the final major blows if it isn't Hezbollah making life in Israel extremely difficult.

Like, they plan on dropping a nuke on Beirut or something?

I mean, they could, but where does that actually get them? hundreds of thousands of dead civilians in an hour, but Hezbollah is still perfectly intact and still firing missiles into their territory, now with a renewed vigor. they would be a pariah state to even half of the West, though the US will obviously continue to support them. it's a similar logic to bombing Gaza with conventional weaponry except compressed into a very short timeframe so the consequences are even worse for Israel.

killing civilians en masse doesn't win you wars, it actually loses them. you inspire resistance to your actions and those munitions aren't being spent on military targets.

Or that Biden has guaranteed 100,000 US troops and 2 carrier groups?

the US no longer has the ability to field armies like this made out of their own troops, and Ansarallah has proved the futility of modern aircraft carriers except in very, very well defended areas

Hezbollah recently released a 10-minute video of a drone that managed to infiltrate whatever is left of Israeli air defense and collected footage of Haifa and everything sensitive therein; locations of air defense systems, ships, storage tanks, etc. The threat is very obvious. Israel can turn Beirut into Gaza, sure; but Hezbollah can turn Israel into Gaza, too. Millions displaced within months. Did you know that Israel gets like 80% of its drinking water from desalination? Did you know that Hezbollah can strike any point in Israel with a missile?

I think if Israel is serious about the offensive, then it'll more-or-less be decided by how far Israel is willing to go before it declares victory and retreats its shattered army. If it's all the way to the Litani, then attritional losses will be catastrophic and Israel knows it cannot even hold that area like it's barely holding Gaza. So I think for self-preservation, they'll only go a few kilometers in.

starting an offensive after Hezbollah has destroyed your border infrastructure and blinded you and while you're demonstrating your inability to "pacify" Gaza with Hamas 70%+ intact despite the most intense war per square kilometer fought in decades is a really strategically sound idea that could have only come from the best Western generals

if Israel goes hard on this offensive and it's not just some half-hearted march of some battalions into a grinder before they declare victory a kilometer past the Israeli border and then retreat again with thousands dead then Israel is collapsing this year. those roads into Jordan will become awfully congested once the ports are smoking wreckages

I'm hoping China can spread this far and wide to other countries (and as cheaply as possible obviously) because it's this kind of shit that will actually provide some technological solutions (it will never be the solution, major changes to the world economy and ideologies are also required or we'll bake ourselves alive chasing infinite growth) to climate change. Rather than like, some AI startup that wants to drop larger and larger ice cubes into the ocean with drones.

this and other things demonstrates why (capitalist) libertarianism is such a nonsensical ideology.

it's tempting to attack it along the lines of "well if you removed all worker protections then we'd be in a capitalist dystopia hellscape of endless suffering" but if you're assuming that with your very savvy business acumen that you definitely, 100% have because you managed to get a few thousand dollars out of cryptocurrency, you will become one of the few billionaires at the top, why give a shit? it's heartless but you don't feel any suffering while cruising around on your yacht which is cruising around in the giant pool of a gigayacht.

instead, one should emphasize that the whole thing of balancing budgets is nonsense, and even the fundamental conceit laying at the heart of libertarianism is just not true; that "the state and market are adversarial opposites" when the exact opposite has been true in capitalist economies for centuries. it also explains why libertarian-oriented parties/leaders which occasionally achieve power (e.g. Milei) never really reduce state power, they just amp up the power of capitalist repression (police, the army, surveillance) while removing worker rights. more-or-less fascism. some libertarians are at least honest and go "oh yeah, this is what I wanted the whole time, I just didn't want to call myself a fascist because that's an unattractive word for my ideology" while others are like "goddamn it! our plans are foiled again! why are all our leaders so inconsistent! they just want power, they don't care about our ideology after all!"

never let these people be regarded as The Economy Understanders just because they have an unhealthy amount of knowledge about the Federal Reserve and how blockchain works

half a century ago: after this whole business in Vietnam is wrapped up, China's next on the chopping block

Like China, India and Mexico, Brazil doesn't believe peace negotiations can take place without dialogue between both parties.

we really are at the point where Western diplomatic acumen has atrophied so much that they still believe they can dictate terms despite being in a losing war. like, I guess it's kinda encouraging that state competency has decayed this much, but it does also mean that WW3 is probably inevitable

I spend some time on curatedtumblr and tumblr. 90% of the posts are nonpolitical and fine, 5% are political and lukewarm, 3% are "not voting for Biden means you literally want every single trans person in the country to die!" which is just boring at this point, and 2% are actually vaguely interesting bad takes

this is like an institutional version of when the general public start becoming conspiracy theorists about vaccines and shit as a deranged response to distrust in state institutions. instead of your 55 year old aunt talking about how "they just have honest questions about vaccine and lockdown efficacy!" it's now media and thinktank experts putting out reports that Russia may plan to block out the sun using a giant satellite as a response to the failure of their disastrous authoritarian deluded ill-advised tragic brutal totalitarian communist fascist violent devastating terrible ruinous incompetent orwellian amateurish oppressive awful inept attempted illegal unprovoked imperialist colonialist invasion of Ukraine

all it'll take is one lucky strike and the Romanian defense will come crashing down. I've heard through the grapevine that Romania's rotated players are very demoralized and haven't been drilling properly. and if not this match, then we should still keep giving the Ukrainian team as much funding as possible or nothing will stop Romania. there are already rumors that other clubs are gonna send over their best coaches to see what they can do

tag yourself, I'm "campists"

The Country of the Week is France!

Feel free to post or recommend any books, essays, studies, articles, and even stories related to France.

If you know a lot about the country and want to share your knowledge and opinions, here are some questions to get you started if you wish:

Check out the reading list. Our books on France:

These books focus on the French Revolution:

• Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution by Robert Roswell Palmer (1941).
• A People's History of the French Revolution by Eric Hazan (2014).

These books focus on 19th century French history:

• The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx (1852).
• The Paris Commune: A Brief History by Carolyn J. Eichner (2022).
• Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 by Eugen Weber (1976).

These books focus on 20th and 21st French history:

• France's Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West's Best Values by Ramin Mazaheri (2022).

I was this kind of liberal back in like 2015, and my reasoning was, in retrospect, essentially entirely predicated on the assumption that Western countries were logical and meritocratic, and so reforms to the FPTP system would be accepted so long as we could demonstrate its superiority. As if the problem was just that politicians needed to be convinced to introduce a better voting system because ranked choice was wrongfully seen as too complicated or something. Luckily I never became a Ranked Choice Guy™, I was still largely apolitical at that point, but the idea of it sounded good and reasonable and common sense so why not believe it.

It later sunk in that no, actually, the system is specifically designed to work this way and the uninspiring candidates and endless broken promises were a feature, not a bug. Also, Australia having mandatory voting and it not meaningfully producing better results was a pretty big point against that whole theory, leading me down the "okay, so we also have to change everybody's mind and convince them to vote for good candidates, surely the powers that be would not oppose better political education so people don't vote for conservative parties that don't benefit them" ideological cul-de-sac until I realized that that's liberal nonsense and transitioned to a socialist and then communist outlook.

it's not even a big revenue source or getting you intel or anything, you just use the money you scam from boomers to buy Xi birthday presents

Financial Times: Russia overtook US as gas supplier to Europe in May

Blah blah blah, context and quotes at the start, the meat of the article is here:

The US overtook Russia as a supplier of gas to Europe in September 2022, and has since 2023 accounted for about a fifth of the region’s supply. But last month, Russian-piped gas and LNG shipments accounted for 15 per cent of total supply to the EU, UK, Switzerland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia, according to data from ICIS. LNG from the US made up 14 per cent of supply to the region, its lowest level since August 2022, the ICIS data showed.

The reversal comes amid a general uptick in European imports of Russian LNG despite several EU countries pushing to impose sanctions on them. Russia in mid-2022 stopped sending gas through pipelines connecting it to north-west Europe, but continues to provide supplies via pipelines through Ukraine and Turkey. Flows in May were affected by one-time factors, including an outage at a major US LNG export facility, while Russia sent more gas through Turkey ahead of planned maintenance in June. Demand for gas in Europe also remains relatively weak, with storage levels near record highs for this time of year.

The reversal was “not likely to last”, said Marzec-Manser of ICIS, as Russia would in the summer be able to ship LNG to Asia via its Northern Sea Route. That was likely to reduce the amount sent to Europe, while US LNG production had picked up again, he said. “Russia has limited flexibility to hold on to this share [in Europe] as demand [for gas] rises into next winter, whereas overall US LNG production is only growing with yet more new capacity coming to the global market by the end of the year,” he added. The transit agreement between Ukraine and Russia also comes to an end this year, putting at risk flows through the route.

the US can't even subjugate their vassals correctly. good god.

China does also have one of (if not the) largest navies and airforces on the planet, though. I also think that blockading the Strait of Malacca in such a way that it doesn't immediately crash the world economy, including the US's, must be very difficult. Nordstream proves that Biden is capable of doing some sicko shit but that was also an explicit benefit to their own economy.

There's also the Arctic route if China is willing to play the long game and wait for a few years, if they can sufficiently motivate Russia to go all-in there (Putin is committing to making more icebreakers and such AFAIK though)

I do agree though that global shipping routes are pretty fragile now though.

the Zionist-Japanese equivalent of the tweet: "the Republic of Indonesia is made up of 10s of thousands of islands hundreds of cultures and languages. the Estonia is made up of beef and onion slop eating hungarians who polished the cocks of german horses for 1000 years before being elevated to sapience by the USSR"

entirely depends whether these kinds of think tanks actually have any power in the American state or if they're purely for creating propaganda.

luckily, America is fucked either way if they try and start shit with China, as Ansarallah has proven by beating the American navy