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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   927 thread views

Transnational Thursday for December 4, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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The Guardian: Brussels goes record-breaking 542 days without a government

The Brussels Capital Region, which governs the Belgian capital of 1.25 million people [roughly comparable to Philadelphia in both population and area], has not had a government since elections in June 2024.

The city has now surpassed the record of the country as a whole, which made headlines around the world in 2010-11 when it took 541 days to form a government, the longest period to form an administration in peacetime.

it is unlikely Brussels will have a government anytime soon. Rancorous divisions, sometimes descending into personal insults, continue among the 14 parties that won places in the 89-seat parliament.

This means deadlock in the self-styled capital of Europe, which hosts the EU institutions and Nato, amid a growing budget crisis, rising levels of drug-related violence, and homelessness as city authorities struggle to manage irregular migrants seeking a place to stay.

An open letter signed by nearly 200 business, academic and cultural figures published on Monday lamented “541 days of seeing Brussels slide into an unprecedented institutional void and funding crisis”. The letter, published in Belgium’s major newspapers, Le Soir and De Standaard, says “political inaction is now affecting our daily lives” and that the “immense challenges that Brussels needs to tackle – economic, social, climatic and institutional – can no longer wait”.

Just wanted to note some news coming out of Vietnam

  1. There has been a lot of flooding in the last month or so in Vietnam.
  2. The incompetency of only giving 2 hour warning for residents downstream of the dam release can easily be painted as downstream of the messy re-organization that Vietnam went through, something I talked about 4 months ago
  3. I am myself not plugged into the situation but this is all within the context of a military vs police political fight in Vietnam. Currently the police is in ascendant because the current general secretary risen up from the police.
  4. A highly morbid story about consensual sexual decapitation, cannibalism, and snuff film dubbed "The Vietnamese Butcher" brew up and exploded all over the Vietnamese interwebs the last few weeks. The "Butcher" has been arrested btw.
  5. Which brings us to the conspiracy theory that 4 is actually just part of the fight in 3, which is to distract the masses from looking deeper into 1 and 2, because there is unconfirmed news that the "Butcher" was some kind of minor government official, possibly from the military.

Personally, I was shocked by my fellow compatriots and wondering if judging by the Japanese penchant for bizarre deaths, maybe I can enjoy good Vietnamese comics in a few decades or so.

Some headlines:

Latin America

The Angry Tide of the Latin American Far Right

Trump Warns of Expanded Military Operations Against Venezuela

Europe

UK slams Putin 'sabre rattling' after he says Russia ready for Europe war and digs in on Ukraine peace talks

Ukraine talks 'productive' but more work needed, Rubio says - BBC News

Middle East

Iran

Iran’s Escalating Air Pollution Crisis

(they use mazut)

Gaza

Israel launches airstrike in southern Gaza after earlier attack by militants wounded 5 soldiers

Over 350 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since ceasefire, authorities say. Is this high?

Asia

HK housing complex fire a warning for Taiwan, since they can observe the repression of protesters afterwards.

Wang Yi and Lavrov jointly emphasized safeguarding the outcomes of World War II. Putin also signed a visa-free order for Chinese citizens.

India/Pakistan

Bangladesh sentences UK Labour MP Tulip Siddiq in absentia to two years in jail for corruption

25% increase in terror incidents in 2025 in Pakistan, think tank report says

India rejected Pakistan's claim that New Delhi denied overflight clearance to Pakistani aircraft carrying humanitarian assistance to Sri Lanka

Africa

UN warns Sudan's Kordofan faces mass atrocities as fighting spreads

200,000 children to die this year because of foreign aid cuts

Tanzanian activist blocked from Instagram after mobilising election protests

Tanzania: US Reviews Ties With Tanzania Over Repression, Post-Election Violence

EU split on Tanzania aid after violent crackdown

Trump hosts signing of peace deal between leaders of DR Congo and Rwanda

E.U Parliament Halts $174 Million Aid to Tanzania

Artificial Intelligence

DeepSeek-v3.2 Release

Gemini 3 Pro

Amazon agents as a service

OpenAI becomes for-profit, gives Microsoft 27% stake. Microsoft will retain rights to OpenAI’s confidential research methods until either an independent expert panel verifies that AGI has been reached or through 2030, whichever comes first, and will keep some post‑AGI commercial rights.

OpenAI's GPT-5.2 'code red' response to Google is coming next week

TPUv7: Google Takes a Swing at the King

Google has moved from internal TPU usage to aggressively commercializing TPUv7 “Ironwood” systems: it is selling complete racks to customers and renting capacity via GCP, with Anthropic as the marquee customer. Google is prioritizing external adoption by ramping TPU software support: efforts include a native PyTorch TPU backend.

Anthropic's Claude 'Soul Document' extracted from Opus 4.5 weights

More tech

China has its own autarkik and probably superior version of Android now. The US is afraid of it.

TIL that in recent years the government of Brazil has laid thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, not underground or at the bottom of the ocean, but at the bottom of the Amazon River!

Funny special report from Reuters: Assad's exiled spy chief and billionaire cousin plot Syrian uprisings from Russia

Assad, who escaped to Russia last December, is largely resigned to exile in Moscow, say four people close to the family. But other senior figures from his inner circle, including his brother, have not come to terms with losing power.

Two of the men once closest to Assad, Maj. Gen. Kamal Hassan and billionaire Rami Makhlouf, are competing to form militias in coastal Syria and Lebanon made up of members of their minority Alawite sect, long associated with the Assad family, Reuters found. All told, the two men and other factions jostling for power are financing more than 50,000 fighters in hope of winning their loyalty.

Details of the scheming are based on interviews with 48 people with direct knowledge of the competing plans. All spoke on condition of anonymity. Reuters also reviewed financial records, operational documents, and exchanges of voice and text messages.

It was on March 9 that Makhlouf started calling himself “The Coast Boy,” declaring in a statement that he had been entrusted with a divine mission to help Alawites. “I’m back, and blessed be the return,” the statement read. It did not mention that he was in Moscow.

Makhlouf now lives on a private floor in a luxurious Radisson hotel in Moscow under tight security, according to nine aides and relatives. He quotes frequently from the Quran. They said he became deeply religious during house arrest, using the time in isolation to write a three-volume series on Islamic lore and interpretation.

According to Makhlouf’s Facebook posts and WhatsApp messages to associates, he believes God gave him money and influence so he can play a messianic role in a Shiite prophecy involving the battle of Armageddon in Damascus. In his interpretation, the apocalypse will arrive after the end of U.S. President Donald Trump’s term. He publicly calls Sharaa “Al Sufyani,” the prophecy’s chief villain, who dies when a fissure in the earth swallows his army.

One of his financial managers told Reuters that Makhlouf has spent at least $6 million on salaries. Payroll tables and salary receipts created by financial aides to Makhlouf in Lebanon claimed he spent $976,705 in May, and that one group of 5,000 fighters received $150,000 in August.

The total force numbers are real, according to five leaders of military groups in Syria who are on Makhlouf’s payroll and lead about a fifth of his following. But Makhlouf’s funding falls short of their needs, amounting to just $20 to $30 a month per fighter.

Altogether, the five local military leaders said they command about 12,000 men in various stages of readiness. One of them told Reuters the time wasn’t yet right for action.

Another of the five commanders derided Makhlouf as trying to buy loyalty with “crumbs of money.”

All five said they had accepted money from both Makhlouf and Hassan, the spy chief. They saw no issue with overlapping paymasters.

“Thousands of Alawites, whether former Syrian soldiers or civilians dismissed from state jobs, live in extreme poverty,” one of the men said. “There is nothing wrong with taking some cash from these whales who sucked our blood for years.”

Since the March killings, the Damascus government has relied on a point man to counter the plotting: Khaled al-Ahmad, a childhood friend of President Sharaa.

Four aides said al-Ahmad is funding and coordinating job creation and economic development because he believes they are the solution to the destabilizing high unemployment that followed the fall of Assad, when the army was dissolved and Alawites lost government posts.

In late October, the Interior Ministry announced the arrest of a coastal cell it said was funded by Makhlouf that was plotting to assassinate journalists and activists. In all, Tartous governor al-Shami said, the number of arrests of people linked to Makhlouf and Hassan was in the dozens.

Along that same coast, stockpiles of gear are quietly gathering dust in underground rooms, according to the [previously quoted anonymous] field commander, who personally keeps watch over several of them.

They’ll be ready when needed, he said, but so far he sees no side worth choosing.

It honestly feels like the ceasefire in Gaza has only incensed widespread Irish antisemitism* even further. Two stories from this week:

For the Americans, the Eurovision Song Contest is a musical competition held every year, hosted by the European Broadcasting Union, in which musical acts representing various nations get up on stage and perform gloriously garish and tacky pop songs. Despite the name and the majority of the competitors being European, countries from outside of Europe are eligible to compete, and Australia and Azerbaijan have taken part at various points over the years. Israel's participation has always been controversial, but it kicked into overdrive since the start of the war in Gaza two years ago. Israel placed second in this year's popular vote, an announcement which was immediately met by accusations of vote-rigging (not sure how that's supposed to work but whatever). Ireland has now joined Spain and the Netherlands in boycotting next year's contest in protest over Israel being allowed to participate.

As I mentioned many months ago, there's a small park in Dublin named after Chaim Herzog, who was born in Belfast, grew up in Dublin and went on to serve as Israel's sixth president. Some time ago there was a social media campaign to rename the park after Hind Rajab. After much discussion, this motion has been officially vetoed by Dublin City Council.

I no longer find it credible that these campaigns and demands are motivated solely by sympathy with the people of Palestine and horror at the war in Gaza. The level of ambient hostility towards anything with the most tangential connection to Israel just seems wholly disproportionate to me. As Eamonn Mac Donnchadha notes in the second article linked above, no other nationality is subjected to this treatment: Pakistanis and Chinese people in Ireland are not habitually called upon to denounce the behaviour of the governments of their home countries. The ongoing Uyghur genocide did not prevent Dublin City Council from observing Chinese New Year.

It's starting to make me really uncomfortable. We should have left these attitudes in the 1940s, and yet eighty years later we're still falling back on the same familiar tropes of cunning, conniving Juden Zionists manipulating public opinion from behind the curtain. My own mother (generally a very sensible woman) recently saw a movie about the Israeli hostage situation in 1972 and immediately jumped to the conclusion that those monstrous Jews Zionists had financed the movie's production in order to curry favour for their genocide in Gaza. A cursory Google quickly showed that the movie went into production months prior to the October 7th attacks – but then, I suppose those were staged by Shin Bet and Mossad as a false flag, weren't they? It never bottoms out.

More than anything I'm just struck by how petty all of this is. "Israel is singing in the contest, so we're not going to sing in the contest" is just embarrassing, fucking Mean Girls "you can't sit with us" energy.

*I'd have been hesitant to label this behaviour as such two years ago, but honestly, at this point it's become so deranged that no other word seems appropriate.

Israelis so far are getting off easy given how they acted.

Israel placed second in this year's popular vote, an announcement which was immediately met by accusations of vote-rigging (not sure how that's supposed to work but whatever)

Correct me if I'm wrong: country with biggest vote share gets the most points, 20 votes per verification method, +/-143k votes in Spain, of which +/-111k were online (supposedly bank account verification), the rest phone verification, 26 options so votes heavily distributed.

Seems rather easy to skew, and reasonable to assume Israeli intelligence or whatever would try. High result is a good talking point, opportunity to frame doubts about the vote as deranged, as you do, is a nice bonus.

More than anything I'm just struck by how petty all of this is.

It's not petty. This stupid contest is not some rigorous musical competition, displays like ostracization of Israel are right at home here.

Renaming a park because it's named after a Jew and, decades later, some unrelated Jews did something you don't approve of strikes me as the definition of petty.

My own mother (generally a very sensible woman) recently saw a movie about the Israeli hostage situation in 1972 and immediately jumped to the conclusion that those monstrous Jews Zionists had financed the movie's production in order to curry favour for their genocide in Gaza. A cursory Google quickly showed that the movie went into production months prior to the October 7th attacks – but then, I suppose those were staged by Shin Bet and Mossad as a false flag, weren't they? It never bottoms out.

Has she seen Munich?

Not that I'm aware of. I've been meaning to watch it for a long time. Have you seen it? Is it any good?

It’s ok, the brief depiction of the attack is pretty accurate, but the majority of the movie which is about the assassination campaign afterward is heavily fictionalized. Also it’s a bit overly sentimental for my taste, I don’t think Spielberg was the best fit for the material even if he was the one who got it made.

I enjoyed it. I'd definitely recommend it to someone who's already got an interest in the conflict more generally.

As disproportionate as the Irish/Spanish/Dutch response is, I really don't think it's honest to describe it as antisemitism. These people don't hate Jews, they hate Israelis. And not because they think The Eternal Jew is conniving, but because the Israeli settler represents everything evil in the left-wing world view.

The settler is, in their minds; white, rich, patriotic, religious, nationalistic and militarist, and he is colonising the lands of poor browns. Israel is South Africa on steroids, and it's not as if left-wingers boycotted South Africa because of anti-Dutch sentiment. The Israelis are western enough to be held to western standards, but they don't behave like European countries are supposed to.

China and Pakistan get away with it because they're not white, and therefore don't fit so easily into the white oppressor archetype.

but because the Israeli settler represents everything evil in the left-wing world view

Or rather, the Israeli settler's existence is blasphemous by European religion. And while we can dispute the way Europeans came upon this religion, the fact remains that the existence of Israelis speak against it, and by extension the Great Satan (that being the United States) that [in their view, and arguably correctly] is the only reason they can exist.

We compare this to anti-semitism because Jews have been against European religion before, but the god they worshipped was different back then so it was expressed differently. Right now, Europeans worship a pantheon of various unnamed goddesses, so the methods of addressing blasphemy are a lot more "required to self-flagellate and live in terror and continual denial of the capabilities and desires others assume you have" than they used to be with respect to forced but one-time conversions, expulsion, and just straight up death.

China and Pakistan get away with it because they're not white

The European priestesses can rail against China and Pakistan all they like; they can't do shit about what they do, and they know it (compare "fargroup"). It's not so much "not white" as they are "can't possibly convince America to impose European religion on them", but they can do that to Israel due to it being a tiny country that is simply America's favorite vassal state (and to a point are jealous of this).

And in fairness, Europeans believe this worked against South Africa because the American religion adherents imposed American religion on them around the time a sea-change in what that was occurred (i.e. the 60s), and that just happened to rhyme/align with what European religion is now (so obviously, it was their efforts that did it). So naturally, Europeans will try this with Israel, and will hence do things like try to drag Israeli officials into its ecclesiastical court (and the Americans find rhetorically useful to honor when it suits them, like having the Europeans excommunicate the Russian king a few years ago when he declared war on the buffer state between Europe and Russia) and sanction the Great Satan (the US) over its violation of what Europe perceives, in some degree correctly, is American religious law.

But American religion (or at least, the religion native to Americans) remains compatible with Israeli goals; maximally cynically, it draws a distinction between brown and Black. Even European religion adherents in the US have mostly failed to have the American care for Black extend to brown, which is why they're conflated by adherents of that religion.

These people don't hate Jews, they hate Israelis

My feeling is that what they particularly hate is Israeli Jews. If you asked them about their opinion on Israeli Arabs (assuming they know they exist), they'd probably be neutral to positively inclined.

Regardless, I find the arguments about whether or not all of this counts as anti-semitism to be a distraction. The common leftist position that every Israeli Jew deserves to be brutally murdered would be equally horrific in an alternative universe where everyone in Israel was Hindu.

If you asked them about their opinion on Israeli Arabs (assuming they know they exist), they'd probably be neutral to positively inclined.

Well obviously, the Israeli Arabs are just a well-off subset of the oppressed Palestinian people, in the anti-Israeli view. That's not exactly unreasonable, the Israeli Arabs aren't enthusiastic participants in the Zionist project.

The common leftist position that every Israeli Jew deserves to be brutally murdered would be equally horrific in an alternative universe where everyone in Israel was Hindu.

I'm not sure that view is that common. The more common (if naive) view is that once the Israelis take their boot of the Palestinian throat, then everyone can live in peace and harmony in a post-sectarian democracy. The more likely outcome (massive civil war) may be realistic, but I don't think many leftists actually want it. Not least because the Palestinians would lose.

the Israeli Arabs aren't enthusiastic participants in the Zionist project.

Depending on what you mean by "Zionist project". Majority of Israeli Arabs are very happy to live in a relatively well-off Westernized country, with working courts, police, social lifts, opportunities and, not to forget, welfare. Now, they may claim they don't get a fair share of the pie (whatever that may be) and in some cases, they'd be correct (and in some other cases, it'd be their own fault). But they still are getting much better deal than many of their peers in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan or PA, to say nothing of Gaza - and they know it. Now, do they identify with the dream of Hertzl and Ben Gurion? Nah, not so much. But they are willing to work with what they've got. Of course, there are others that want Israel destroyed - but even of those most, if examined, would in fact wish something like "we'd like things to stay mostly the same, but with us in change instead of the Jews". Not many want to become Gaza or Lebanon.

I don't think many leftists actually want it. Not least because the Palestinians would lose.

That's the point. They want the war which Palestinians would not lose. And this war can only look one way. We saw that way on October 7, 2023. And the left massively confirmed, by their own volition, that this is exactly what they wanted.

Well obviously, the Israeli Arabs are just a well-off subset of the oppressed Palestinian people, in the anti-Israeli view. That's not exactly unreasonable, the Israeli Arabs aren't enthusiastic participants in the Zionist project.

This doesn't change the fact that hating Israelis and hating specifically Israeli Jews are meaningfully different positions.

I'm not sure that view is that common.

I stand by my position, with the caveat that by "leftist" I'm not referring to normal people who typically vote Labour/Democrat and only get their news from the BBC/NYT. I'm talking about the sort of left-wing people who put flags/pronouns in social media bios, usually very online and of the sort who show up to LGBTQ/BLM/Palestine marches. I'd estimate that about significant proportion of them literally want every Israeli Jew dead. If you've got evidence against this, I'd be happy to hear it. It would definitely restore my faith in humanity somewhat.

That's not exactly unreasonable, the Israeli Arabs aren't enthusiastic participants in the Zionist project.

Some and some. There's at least one sitting Knesset member who's part of Bibi's Likud party, for example. Likewise, many Israeli Arabs have served in the IDF.

And I know a woman who is really tall, therefore men and women are the same height.

Less flippantly, that IDF unit has 500 men in a force of 169,500. And my bet is that a supermajority of Arabs serving in the IDF are Druze and Christians.

There are also pacificistic or anti-Zionist Israeli Jews, but they are clearly not the people driving current Israeli policy.

I never claimed that the average Arab Israeli is an enthusiastic supporter of the Zionist project, or that the majority of that group are, merely that it's misleading to claim that all of them are opposed.

A survey from a year ago found that 58% of Arab Israelis believe the most recent conflict has "fostered a sense of shared destiny between Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis". An earlier survey found that 55% consider themselves "proud citizens of Israel".

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