weird how basic patterns that have been in place for the last two years keep happening and yet every time we seem to get people being like “wow, cases are high but death is low! do we finally have the situation under control?” and then three weeks later, there’s articles about how nurses are using potato sacks as gloves or something because there’s literally no equipment left.

Colombia has expelled the Israeli ambassador, hopefully starting a trend

Hexbear might actually be one of the most non-bigoted places on the internet. we are militantly against bigotry. no epic logical debates here, you just get smacked in the fucking face by a banhammer if you try that shit here

There was more sympathy in most of the Western media for that billionaire bozo who got owned in that Titanic submarine than for all the civilians murdered in the Gaza Strip, I swear to god

There’s this fascinating contradiction that we’ve seen now in both Ukraine and Israel where they’re simultaneously asserting that everything is good because their air defense systems intercepted everything, Iran/Russia is seething and coping because of it, etc etc; but also that this was a massive and brutal escalation and Iran/Russia must be punished for all the harm they’ve done to us. I can’t personally say I care that much about whatever narratives that Israel produces to cope with their losses, and the last six months show well how Israel even more so than Ukraine is putting all their cards into propaganda in the hopes that it’ll affect things in the real world somehow, as if saying that your military bases aren’t being BTFO will un-explode them.

Last night really was a paradigm shift, which was easy for me to forget in the videos of drones and missiles smacking into Israeli installations. Israel’s sense of invulnerability shattered on October 7th, and their operations and propaganda inside the Gaza Strip since then has been one big attempt to not just attempt the impossible task of destroying Hamas, but to rebuild that sense of strength in their society. When Hezbollah and Yemen joined in, it was two further blows to them. But one thing that Israel could tell itself while rocking back and forth in the fetal position was that there was still one last shield it possessed, one way in which it was still strong - it knew that Iran would never attack them directly. They simply would not dare. It would be too massive of a hurdle to jump, too dangerous for Iran to strike them, a nuclear-armed power. They would only ever act through resistance groups, they thought. And that has been more-or-less true for many decades now.

Until last night. The Rubicon has been crossed. There’s now little left for Israel’s sense of protection. Weeks where decades happen.

If anybody wants to know what the hell I’ve been doing for the last month that has disrupted the Goddamn News schedule, it’s been creating this hefty list of theory that is now up on the bulletins website. It’s far from finished, but I got to like 75 pages in Google Docs and I was just tired of sitting on it for any longer.

And these aren’t all just crusty books from the 1940s. There are a couple on there from 2024 and quite a few from 2023, for example.

Post explaining it here.

The regular posting schedule will be continuing ASAP.

coming through for me one last time

edit: Rogov has confirmed it which is enough for me to switch the megathread title

good god, already seeing “well, shucks. we were THIS close to Holding Netanyahu Accountable and now Iran has done this and made people support him again” takes. there’s eating from the trashcan of ideology and then there’s going out to your nearest landfill and diving headfirst into it

man, getting more and more exposure to the libs on here, it’s just…

I, too, once thought Castro was a dictator. I, too, once thought that China was a totalitarian hellscape in which people are governed by social credit scores. I, too, once thought that the DPRK was a so-called “hermit kingdom” of its own making with effectively hereditary monarchs. I, too, once thought that the Soviet Union was an abject failure, or at best a highly imperfect project that “proved” that communism cannot work in practice. I, too, thought that liberalism and civility and rational debate and compromise between differing political parties was the only way to really achieve anything, and that you must always take the high road even while your right-wing opposite takes dishonourable stabs at you. I believed that swathes of Africa and Asia were undeveloped - rather than underdeveloped - because of corruption, not exploitation. The war in Iraq might have been bad in retrospect and we shouldn’t have gone in based on a lie, but somebody had to be the world police. That’s obvious, right? The police are what keeps us safe!

These were all beliefs I had when I was young and sheltered from the world, when the hard edge of economic consequences hadn’t yet really hit me. When those consequences and problems did hit me, I didn’t have the classic experience of going from a dreamy liberal living in fantasies of equality to a hardened conservative who understood that things have to be unfair because that’s just life. I realized, through personal experiences and also through exposure to ideas from the left, including some of the people on here, that most of what I knew about other countries and history was tainted with misinformation, or twisted beyond recognition, or just flatly not true. I wasn’t brainwashed. I haven’t been turned into an agent for a foreign government. I’m certainly not in an echo chamber - I’m literally surrounded by contrary ideas every day because other people play the radio or watch the television around me and expose me to the latest and greatest of liberal arguments for X and Y.

Others have expressed this point before, what strikes me about all the libs on here is that they seem totally unaware that the vast majority of us once held the exact same positions that they once did and have moved past them. That we might have been in their shoes. We all know the arguments, we’ve not only seen them, many of us were previously convinced by them.

1-2 weeks ago: “Leftists have no idea about history. People can join bad organizations, even the Waffen-SS, to resist a foreign occupation and that doesn’t make them a Nazi or a bad person.”

Now: “Any Palestinian who joins or assists Hamas or any militant Palestinian group should be shot on sight. I support a complete siege of Gaza; all 2 million people inside must suffer, even die, for their crimes.”