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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   32622 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Crazy news out of the Middle East today.

While Iran plots its big revenge via Hezbollah, Israel isn't just waiting around for them to strike. They're pre-emptively disrupting their operations. And today's attack is next-level.

Somehow, Israel hacked the pagers used by a couple thousand Hezbollah members. And then they made the pagers explode simultaneously, leaving over 200 of them seriously injured. People on Twitter are speculating that Israel confiscated the pagers, then implanted explosives, and then returned them to Hezbollah who stupidly continued to use them . It seems unlikely that a software hack could make a battery explode. Edit: A better explanation is that Israel somehow intercepted the pagers during shipping and implanted explosives.

Whatever happened, its more evidence of both Israel's ability to strike at its enemies, and also the incompetence of those enemies.

From a strategic standpoint, it seems that Israel is now grimly determined to win the war militarily as they (accurately) perceive their enemies as unreliable partners in peace.

Technical part is not interesting. Many ways to do it. I am not sure how exposing this capability now helps Israel.

This is one of those - it can work only once things. So they either had some imminent threat to deal with or...?

It doesn't just work once but it imposes an ongoing cost to your enemies operations to avoid the same thing happening again.

I mean... wouldn't they just make sure to dismantle a handful of pagers before distributing them from now on? They'd have to pack the things with high explosives to get a result like this, would be easy to find, not much of a cost.

They'll likely short term want to change up suppliers if that info is compromised, but by blowing up all the pagers Israel has revealed this which means it can't be used in the future and if there are other capabilities downstream from this supplier compromised like wire taps etc. Now Hezbollah knows to toss the electronics.

Yeah with the phone hacking it’s plausible that they can always find another exploit, but with this kind of physical modification it doesn’t actually invalidate the pagers as a method of communication at all.

I think the main benefit is likely psychological. Conspiracies about Israel being behind everything are already very common in the Arab world, 22 year old Hezbollah recruits aren’t familiar with the specifics of what Mossad can and can’t do. If they’re handed the next pager and promised “I swear, this one won’t blow up”, they might not believe it.

Maybe not just in the Arab world at this point.

If I was the sort of person inclined to try to convince people that "They" didn't get Epstein, shit like this would certainly make my job harder.

The argument against ‘them’ doing Epstein was always obvious. If you want to convince a bunch of rich Jews to support Israel, you don’t need to blackmail them with footage of them fucking teenagers lol.

you don’t need to blackmail them with footage of them fucking teenagers

The operative word the media used tended to be "children", not "teenagers".

The masses are stupid enough to believe a 17 year old is a child, so it works.

True, and indeed it was rarely remarked upon in the Prince Andrew case that - unless he explicitly paid her for sex - sleeping with a 17 year old Virginia Giuffre was entirely legal under British law at the time and now.

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