Friday
Soriek
1yr ago
Ecuador
Underdog businessman Daniel Noboa will be sworn in as President next week. In the meantime, he has dealt with his minority in the legislature by, surprisingly, working together with the leftist party he ran of removing from power.
Hopefully this means whatever emerges from the next few years will be a moderate mix of the better parts of both parties.
Ecuador's National Assembly chose a conservative as its president on Friday as the new legislative period began, amid a deal between the parties of President-elect Daniel Noboa and ex-President Rafael Correa to form a majority….
The conservative Social Christian Party (PSC), Correa's Citizens' Revolution movement, and Noboa's National Democratic Action (ADN) had agreed to form a legislative majority of at least 85 votes.
The Construye party of assassinated anti-corruption presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, which has 18 seats, has said it will not join the coalition because of its opposition to Correa….
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1yr ago
I like that Ilya Sutskever is one of the 12 signatories on the first page of the open letter, but also on the Open AI board and is reportedly the instigator of Altman's ouster.
That conflict between fast growth and A.I. safety came into focus on Friday afternoon, when Mr. Altman was pushed out of his job by four of OpenAI’s six board members, led by Mr. Sutskever. The move shocked OpenAI employees and the rest of the tech industry, including Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in the company. Some industry insiders were saying the split was as significant as when Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985.
For some reason, this 24-hour window from Friday morning to Saturday morning seems to always pack a lot of news
For years I've heard repeated bitter complaints that the government drops bad news on Friday afternoons in order to avoid the weekday news commenting on it. Bonus points for late Friday before a holiday so the next week has low news engagement.
I guess this is the corporate version.
wraelk
1yr ago
For some reason, this 24-hour window from Friday morning to Saturday morning seems to always pack a lot of news
This doesn't work for all of your examples, but I think part of it is that companies will often wait until late Friday to make moves that could get a lot of pushback. The extremely-online types will always pick it up anyway, but the normal people will often be less interested because it's the weekend and they've got things to do, so it reduces how much it gets picked up. By the time Monday rolls around the momentum of the pushback is often lost.
Actually, hadn't thought about it like this before, but that's also probably to reduce big stock shifts, give the news time to settle a bit before people get to trade on it.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1yr ago
Brian Armstrong tweeted now that $80 billion of company value has been 'evaporated'. I'm like 'what?' You realize that there is still an immensely popular product with millions of users? A few departures even of key people does not change that. i don't get it...it's like social media compels otherwise rational, smart people to make incendiary statements for attention. It's not like creating 'the next Open Ai' will be easy...look how hard Google has struggled despite unlimited resources and PR. I dunno how much valuation has been lost, but if it were public, probably a 10-20% decline in share price on Monday on this news. Bad but not critical at all. I agree he's right about wokeness, but as we've seen with the huge success of Silicon Valley tech companies, wokeness is evidently not a hindrance to success as much as he may dislike it.
I also observed how it seems like important news and events are always on Friday-Saturday, for example:
Gaza conflict
Starship launch
Open Ai board upheaval
Twitter advertisers defecting over alleged antisemitic post by Elon
For some reason, this 24-hour window from Friday morning to Saturday morning seems to always pack a lot of news
Great counterexamples. Maybe if there's a thread that runs througout it's a British distrust more of the dirty business of politics, contrasted to a larger trust in the permanent bureaucracy; "Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century, politics is about suriving until Friday afternoon." Even when the civil servants in Yes Minister are portrayed as completely cynical, they still seem like a beacon of competence and stability throughout the larger society.
In contrast the American depiction of democracy itself is more optimistic (or at least it was in the early 2000s) but their suspicion of the entrenched bureaucracy is much higher.
Soriek
1yr ago
Myanmar
The war between the Bamar military junta of Myanmar and their one trillion ethnic secessionist groups has been waging forever, but a twist in the past two years has changed the power dynamic quite a bit - several of the rebel groups have been for the first time working together. For the first time in a while it seems like the military is on the defensive from multiple angles:
Myanmar’s military government faced a fresh challenge Monday when one of the armed ethnic groups in an alliance that recently gained strategic territory in the country’s northeast launched attacks in the western state of Rakhine.
The Arakan Army launched surprise assaults on two outposts of the Border Guard Police, a paramilitary force, in Rakhine’s Rathedaung township, according to independent online media and area residents. The attacks took place despite a yearlong cease-fire with Myanmar’s military government…
The offensive in the northern part of Shan state was already seen as a significant challenge for the army, which has struggled to contain a nationwide uprising by the members of Peoples’ Defense Force. The pro-democracy resistance organization was formed after the army seized power from Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government in February 2021. It also set up loose alliances with several of the ethnic armed groups.
“If combat persists, it will open a significant new front for the regime, which is already overstretched with fighting, including on its eastern border with China,” Richard Horsey, the senior adviser on Myanmar for the Crisis Group think tank, said in an emailed statement.
This comes on the Heels of the United Nations releasing a grim retrospective on the conflict:
About 90,000 people have been displaced in Myanmar due to the intensifying conflict between the country’s military rulers and an alliance of ethnic armed groups, the United Nations said.
“As of 9 November, almost 50,000 people in northern Shan were forced into displacement,” the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in an update on Friday.
A further 40,000 people have been displaced by clashes between the military and its opponents in neighbouring Sagaing region and Kachin state since early November, OCHA added…
On Thursday, Myint Swe, appointed as Myanmar’s president after the coup, told a national defence and security council meeting in the country that “if the government does not effectively manage the incidents happening in the border region, the country will be split into various parts”.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1yr ago
Israel struck the Al-Shifa hospital and then lied about the source being misfired Palestinian munitions. The IDF even provided a trajectory map of the projectiles which they claimed to be based on radar detections:
It was the first of at least four strikes involving multiple munitions on different sections of the sprawling complex between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. Friday morning. Al-Shifa’s director, Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, said in a phone interview that seven people had been killed and several others had been wounded.
Hours after the final blast, the Israeli military blamed unspecified Palestinian militants, saying a “misfired projectile” aimed at Israel Defense Forces troops deployed nearby had instead hit the hospital.
But at least three of the projectiles that struck it appear to have been Israeli munitions, according to pictures of weapons fragments collected and verified by The New York Times and analyzed by experts...
Israel’s assertion that Al-Shifa was actually hit by a Palestinian projectile echoed similar — and unresolved — claims and counterclaims following munitions that hit the courtyard of another Gaza hospital, Al-Ahli, nearly a month ago...
In addition to the weapons remnants, an analysis of video footage shows that three of the projectiles were fired into the hospital from the north and south, contrary to the western trajectory indicated on a map released by the I.D.F., which it said was based on radar detections. A review of satellite images showed there were I.D.F. positions north and south of the hospital early Friday.
The strikes analyzed by The Times did not appear to be targeting underground infrastructure. Two of the most severe strikes hit upper floors of the maternity ward.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
This is probably a good Friday Fun topic at some point. As an American that keeps my home between 68-71 Freedomtemp (20-21.5 for People of Celsius), I was absolutely baffled to discover that most spaces in Tokyo are about the temperature you're describing, at least during summer when I was there. I don't recall a similar problem in Australia, but Melbourne and Sydney weren't very hot when we were in town anyway. Port Douglas and Cairns seemed hot, but I was also dressed very lightly, so it seemed fine.
I'm curious what other countries are like and what people's reactions are.
Again with this shit. Because humanity hasn't solved all its problems and answered all questions, it has actually stagnated for centuries. Millennia!
Natural selection is very much evidence against god that didn't exist a 1000 years ago. People used the inexplicable miracle of life as evidence for god right up until it was explicable. Of course an implication directly leads to its contrapositive, not the negation, but I'd say the negation is usually implied in a Bayesian sense. Of course, Bayes himself is a lot more recent than a 1000 years.
Every aspect of the mind that gets explained and controlled by physics and chemistry is evidence against the existence of a soul. As people learn to measure and control your every impulse and emotion by manipulating your brain, you'll continue to shift the goalposts as long as they haven't solved the hard problem. (Which religion doesn't either of course. One the most beautiful aspects of materialism is that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer where religion pretends to knowledge it doesn't have or goes for "it is unknowable", a statement with an impossible burden of proof that has been shown wrong on innumerable topics time over time.)
Edit: and mormonism and scientology among others are new evidence against Jesus being the son of god. Any new cult with nonsense supernatural claims taken just as seriously as the old ones is evidence against the old ones being true by giving more data on the patters of how such beliefs form.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Watching the rise of a nominally new Gaia-based religion to replace the remnants of Christianity in Europe in real-time is going to be genuinely fascinating. Looking at successful religions, dietary restrictions and the conspicuous observance of them seems ritualistically important in binding people together and giving them a sense of commitment. Selecting a specific day for conspicuous dietary restriction is pretty on the nose, even if Tofurkey doesn't hold quite the culinary appeal of a good ol' Catholic fish fry Friday.
At least in Europe (or maybe just Germany) there is increasing demand for vegan food and the main advertized advantage is that it is more eco friendly. Animal welfare is a bonus, but is more used as an argument by organic farmers pushing their animal products, eg one should drink bio milk and bio cheese from happy cows from the idyllic small family farm in your region, instead of buying from the gruesome big business factory farm industry.
German food culture is changing. The number of vegans is growing, and more than half of the population wants to reduce meat consumption, considering themselves flexitarian. This makes Germany one of the most important markets for plant-based food
A common explanation for the rise of flexitarians in Germany is that young people are driving the change and taking their parents with them. Germans are generally very eco-conscious and young people are very much aware of the environmental effects of meat consumption. For example, Germany’s Fridays for Future Movement demands halving meat consumption by 2035. By comparison, the Fridays for Future Movement website in the United States does not say anything about meat.
Of course it sorts itself into a little bit of culture war issue here, as vegan products are more coded left/young/urban/educated/female and eating meat is more rightwing/boomer/rural/workingclass/male, and politicians pander to certain voter segments with the food they post at instagram …
https://www-derwesten-de.translate.goog/panorama/promi-tv/markus-lanz-markus-soeder-zdf-mediathek-gaeste-id300507832.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp
… but I see at family gatherings the resigned acceptance that a vegan alternative has to be served.
‘The Marvels’ Meltdown: Disney MCU Seeing Lowest B.O. Opening Ever At $47M+ — What Went Wrong
SATURDAY AM UPDATE: The last-minute push for The Marvels with an appearance by star Brie Larson on The Tonight Show and at a theater in NYC post-actors strike have not moved weekend grosses any higher for Marvel Studios‘ The Marvels. The film is seeing a Friday in the vicinity of where we expected it at $21.5M, and a weekend opening between $47M-$52M, the lowest ever for Disney‘s Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Oh, also, The Marvels gets one of several post-pandemic B CinemaScores from audiences after Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (B+), Thor Love & Thunder (B+), Eternals (B), and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (B). Comscore/Screen Engine PostTrak exits are worse at 3 1/2 stars and a 73% positi
It's even worse after factoring in double-digit inflation since 2021 or so. Disney, however, is the master of 'Hollywood accounting' and squeezing every drop of water from a franchise installment, such as licensing or merchandizes for years after the movie is discontinued from theatres. Also the "Disney‘s Marvel Cinematic Universe" is comprised of 24 movies. Some of these movies are expected to be underwhelming or loss-leaders and are not given an equal marketing push. It's assumed that Iron Man sequels will do better than stuff like "Ant-Man and the Wasp".
Richard Hanania blames gender pandering/wokeness, but it's worth noting that the 2017 Wonder Woman did well ($800+ million gross total , $100+ million open) despite obviously having a female lead. Also, having a pretty (by conventional Western standards) blonde lead does not also fit into the wokeness paradigm either.
To your last point, I'm a little bit hesitant about going into detail about my specific situation, but I made less than $35,000 last year working full time, and while this year is an anomaly, I probably won't break $15,000 this year.
If I were to land a position in the coming year that paid me $50,000/yr, which I'm hopeful about the prospect of pending an interview here soon, I'd consider that a substantial upgrade from any position I've ever had. I am 30.
I do consider it a major personal failing that I did not pursue a career track more optimized for income over the past decade. I've gotten in on the ground floor of about 4 different lines of work whose skill sets largely do not overlap. This was avoidable, I had the sense to know it the whole time. I have half of a BFA degree from ten years ago, which is almost as embarrassing as it would've been to pay for the whole BFA degree, and exactly as useful. I have several well-developed skills in lines of work that there's not really any good money in in the first place, and have spent many of the last few years committed to working at low wages for small to medium-sized local businesses that I knew very well from the beginning had no capacity for upward mobility or even guaranteed longterm solvency.
I'd say it's the central failure of my life, not to get too dramatic in the Friday Fun Thread. I get by alright, day to day, it could absolutely be worse, and I manage my expenses well enough, but there's certainly no room in my life for supporting a partner or a family the way I would want to be able to do at my age. I may be starting to wrench myself out of the bottom of the trough now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes me another decade to get where my peers are right now, assuming I ever do. I like to think of myself as a relatively capable and intelligent person, but the hard facts of my education choices, employment choices and resulting income over the last ten years could make a pretty solid case that I might actually be stupid.
I guess at least I don't gamble.
laxam
1yr ago
Imo doomerism has always seemed much to convenient to me. Most people, especially women, know that not having kids is a thoroughly antisocial choice in general (there are exceptions of course, such as having serious genetic disorders), so doomerism allows them to reclaim the moral high ground. They get to continue their life of short-sighted hedonism while also feeling morally superior. Of course, there are people whom I believe their doomerism to be sincere, but it's quite rare. Much more common is partying all the time, except the parties are totally for a cause and not just for fun. Perfect example is fridays for future, which consisted of 99% getting to skip school and 1% thinly-veiled excuses how that's the moral thing to do.
Protests themselves are a fun group activity, when they're not outright parties/festivals.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Max Blumenthal’s TheGrayZone has an interesting article compiling accounts of Israel shelling / shooting its own citizens during the October 7 attack. Lots of citations to mainstream newspapers; of course, that shouldn’t preclude being skeptical of his overall point. Some excerpts:
Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in, “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
An Israeli woman named Yasmin Porat confirmed in an interview with Israel Radio that the military “undoubtedly” killed numerous Israeli noncombatants during gun battles with Hamas militants on October 7. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she stated, referring to Israeli special forces.
According to Haaretz, the army was only able to restore control over Be’eri after admittedly “shelling” the homes of Israelis who had been taken captive. “The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri residents were killed,” the paper chronicled. “Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble.”
Hitting low-probability potential targets in order to prevent hostages leaving Israel — regardless of whether it kills the hostages — would be in line with Israel’s Hannibal Directive. Examples of this in the past include —
The Hannibal Directive was invoked in October 2000 after the Hezbollah capture of three Israeli soldiers in the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms area. An Israeli border patrol was attacked by a Hezbollah squad with rockets and automatic fire. St.-Sgt. Adi Avitan, St.-Sgt. Benyamin Avraham and St.-Sgt. Omar Sawaid were captured and brought over the ceasefire line into Lebanon by their captors. When the abduction was discovered, the Northern Command ordered a "Hannibal situation". Israeli attack helicopters fired at 26 moving vehicles in the area since they assumed that the abducted soldiers were transported in one of them.
During the 2014 Gaza War, the third major offensive launched by Israel in Gaza since 2008, IDF Givati Brigade Lieutenant Hadar Goldin was captured by Hamas soldiers after a brief skirmish on August 1, despite the announcement of a 72-hour ceasefire agreement earlier that day. Israel then reportedly initiated the Hannibal Directive, ultimately resulting in carnage dubbed "Black Friday. The IDF carried out air and ground attacks on residential areas of Rafah during the Hannibal Directive attempt to prevent capture of Lt. Goldin. A2015 joint report by Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture found that Israel's indiscriminate violence against all human life amounted to war crimes. […] The massive Israeli bombardment killed between 135 and 200 Palestinian civilians, including 75 children, in the three hours following the suspected capture of the one Israeli soldier.
I wonder how many of the civilians and particularly the children were actually killed as part of the Hannibal Directive. I guess it’s unlikely we will ever know. How would it change the moral calculus if some quantity of the Israeli children killed were actually shelled by the IDF in an attempt to prevent them becoming hostages and kill the hostage-takers?
RenOS
something is wrong
1yr ago
I think that the most pervasive cause is still that none of us have any mental conception of a (capital-g,l?) good life that features children.
I agree that this is a big reason, but imo it's so much more than that. Our society strongly incentives childlessness through multiple channels: Companies actively try to punish you for having children as far as the legal system allows, the government itself guarantees a pension for childless people that we barely can afford, both the culture and the government work hand-in-hand see it as their prerogative to judge parents as they see fit and take away parental rights if need be and finally, possibly most of all, the culture strongly pushes teens and young adults to delay pregnancy and in fact most contact with younger children until both their biological fitness has atrophied so much that a decent percentage of people struggle to have kids despite wanting to, while another part has, as you point out, no conception whatsoever what a life with children actually looks like. It doesn't help that media very consistently pushes an image of children as just getting in the way of the adventure that is usually central to the plot.
And I think another big issue is that society pushes exceptionalism in general - everyone is supposed to find their one true calling, be it an amazing career, true love, personal self-realisation (which conveniently always ends up to be some kind of hedonism) etc. Children are not only too mundane to fit the bill, they also make many of those things very difficult to achieve, especially with the limitations modern life heaps on parents.
Imo doomerism has always seemed much to convenient to me. Most people, especially women, know that not having kids is a thoroughly antisocial choice in general (there are exceptions of course, such as having serious genetic disorders), so doomerism allows them to reclaim the moral high ground. They get to continue their life of short-sighted hedonism while also feeling morally superior. Of course, there are people whom I believe their doomerism to be sincere, but it's quite rare. Much more common is partying all the time, except the parties are totally for a cause and not just for fun. Perfect example is fridays for future, which consisted of 99% getting to skip school and 1% thinly-veiled excuses how that's the moral thing to do.
experiences (which children get in the way of) over things (which children don't get in the way of as much)
Ironically this is a great example of your earlier point. As a parent, I'd actually say it's the opposite: With kids, you get a ton of amazing experiences entirely for free, so much that experiences you used to enjoy such as travelling start to become boring & pointless in comparison. On the other hand, kids are genuinely expensive, so you can afford a lot less things.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
The Afghanistan Papers revealed that if the truth is sufficiently awful people will refuse to believe it or discuss it because they are convinced it's more plausible that racially biased people are making unfounded accusations.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1457753480840372231 (US forces unable to stop child rape and because 'it's their culture')
"Homosexuality was taboo among adults but it was not uncommon for afghan men of means to commit a form of sexual abuse known as bacha bazi, or boy play. Afghan military officers, warlords, and other power brokers proclaimed their status by keeping tea boys or other adolescent male servants as sex slaves. US troops referred to the practice as "man-love Thursday" because Afghan pederasts would force boys to dress up or dance on Thursday evenings before the start of the afghan weekend. Although American soldiers were sickened by the abuse, their commanders instructed them to look the other way because they didn't want to alienate allies in the fight against the taliban"
I also recall an old Foreign Affairs article that made an addendum to why it happens on Thursday. Broadly speaking, many Afghans believed that prayer on the Islamic holy day, friday, cleansed them of their sins. So if you rape someone on Thursday, pray on friday, you are then clean and worthy of paradise on saturday. Of course the sin was the homosexuality, not the rape.
What makes it doubly insane is that Bachi Bazi was a source of illegitimacy among the wider populace. which means destroying it would have an actually removed a source of Taliban legitimacy.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1366444372972081153 (bachi bazi as source for taliban support)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELZD1UIU0AE8WxU?format=jpg&name=large (Afghan governor was a drug dealer and tyrant but his province was actually stable)
When the US was stuck between a hardliner who could keep the peace and total anarchy it was incapable of biting the bullet as a matter of policy. If stuck between a plan that had proven successful but icky or a plan that would be unsuccessful but sounds good it went with the sounds good.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELZE6_TUUAI9rdH?format=jpg&name=large (US aid would filter through contractors over and over again until about 1/20th actually made it to the country)
Literal actual corruption would have been more efficacious then what the US did. The US would spend outrageous amounts of money on domestic actors and not make any use of the purchasing power difference of Afghanistan being dirt poor. Who do we have to thank for this lighting money on fire policy? Thank staunch conservative senator Jessie Helms.
"...because when the soviet union fell apart we had to cut a deal with Jessie Helms to continue our aid programs. The deal with Jessie Helms was that we would spend the money in the United States. We would buy American products, American grain, American consultants, American Security experts, and they would implement our aid programs."
Finally just for a final kicker. Rural Afghanistan could be so isolated that it would literally inbred. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FDr8Z6lVIAMK_O6?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 ("I hate to say it, but there was a lot of inbreeding. The district chief had three thumbs" he said in an Army oral-history interview.)
That's a lot of scattered stuff. So lets return to my central point. When the truth is so awful people will take accurate descriptions of the situation as proof of racist evil rather than of tragic suffering.
It would have been tragic but true to describe Afghanistan as a land of inbred child rapists who believe that Islam means that if you commit a sin on Thursday then on Friday its cleansed away. That stability at the hand of tyrants would have been more valuable for producing peace than Western european style metrics about the percentage of women in parliament. And that literal direct bribery and corruption applied at the point of local discretion by the military would have been order of magnitude more effective than actual policy. And that the cause of restricting the military's discretion and demanding Made in America contractor corrupt fiscal suicide was due to a Conservative Senator.
But could you have said that? Does anyone believe that you could walk around in polite society and talk frankly about such issues and how we are going to approach solving them. Could you ever imagine Obama making destroying culturally acceptable religiously justified child rape as his first priority in an hearts & minds strategy?
Twitter personality InverseFlorida invented the term Sanewashing to describe how people watered down "Abolish the Police" into something sane sounding. That people would get angry at you for saying "Abolish the Police means exactly what it says and the people who first started saying it are very clear about this" because those people had actually come to believe that X actually meant Y. People who sanewash really believe their revised version of a statement to be the real meaning of the original statement.
The Afghanistan papers showed that people will Sanewash away not just Insanity, but also Evil. If forced to confront uncomfortable truths they will not just disbelieve a statement but they will go through a process of putting it through a sanewash sieve. Once they have their watered down pseudotruth they will then use that 'truth' as proof that the actual truth is just a racist overexaggeration.
Now consider how many people are unwilling to believe the accusations that Hamas uses hospitals as munitions bunkers & military HQ's. And you will be unable to unsee the instinct to Sanewash Evil.
Lebanon
There has been scattered fighting between the Israelis and the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah, but so far a serious general war has been avoided. Hezbollah leader Hassa Nasrallah last Friday gave a much awaited and heavily attended speech endorsing the Palestinian side of the conflict, reiterated that they had nothing to do with it and giving a bellicose but indirect response to the question of whether he planned to escalate: “Some claim that we are about to engage in the war. I am telling you, we have been engaged in this battle since October 8”.
Following a recent Israeli missile strike that killed several Lebanese civilians, tensions are high, with one Hezbollah lawmaker threatening to respond “double over” against any Israeli attacks.
The violence along the Lebanese border has killed more than 60 Hezbollah fighters and 10 civilians, Lebanese security officials say. At least seven Israeli soldiers and one civilian have been killed.
France, which has been so pro-Israel they banned anti-Israeli marches, has still found themselves calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, and has now offered to send armored vehicles to the Lebanese army to “beef up the Lebanese national army so that it could coordinate well with the United Nations peacekeeping force as tensions mount between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon”.
Hamas has also now claimed that it too is operating within Southern Lebanon and “had launched 16 rockets targeting the northern Israeli city of Nahariya and the southern outskirts of the city of Haifa.”
Soriek
1yr ago
Brazil
Brazil has now joined the ranks of Latin American countries using the military to crack down upon organized crime.
Thousands of troops have taken up position in the ports and airports of Rio and São Paulo and along Brazil’s western border as part of efforts to “asphyxiate” organized crime amid an upsurge in bloodshed and violence.
The military intervention – ordered last Friday by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – will last until next May and is reportedly designed to cut off the drug and gun smuggling routes on which trafficking and mafia groups depend…
This is a major operation and one done in response to extreme public outcry over deteriorating public safety conditions. This is unfortunate, as Brazilian homicide rates had been trending down for much of the previous decade but, like Ecuador, organized gangs seem to have gained a significant amount of ground in a very short window of time.
Late last month, paramilitary gangs known as “milícias” (militias) brought much of west Rio to a standstill, setting fire to dozens of buses and a train in order to stop one of the city’s most wanted mafia bosses being arrested. In early October, three doctors were shot dead outside a five-star beach hotel after assassins seemingly confused one of the group with a crime boss they wanted to kill….
More than 1,000 members of the navy will operate in the container ports of Rio and Itaguaí in Rio state and Santos in São Paulo state from which Brazilian prosecutors say huge quantities of South American cocaine are shipped to Europe each month.
Two thousand army troops, meanwhile, will step up their activities along Brazil’s western borders with Paraguay and Bolivia, across which much of the marijuana, cocaine and weaponry that illegally enters Brazil flows.
They’re also cracking down on the rising issue of, uh, neo-nazis? I guess those confederate enclaves finally got some gumption.
Data on the size of Brazil’s neo-Nazi movement is sparse, but most researchers agree that it has been growing. One researcher tracking neo-Nazi groups, Adriana Dias, an anthropologist at the State University of Campinas, estimated that the number of groups increased from the hundreds in 2019 to more than 1,000 last year.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
As a fellow contracting leech, and one who uses the 9/80 schedule, I was thrilled to realize I have no working Fridays in November. Three day weekends!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
I’ll have you know that one of my precious few saved comments is that burger recipe from March. I don’t even have a grill.
Let's say Jeffrey Epstein wants to have sex with your wife, and will pay both of you $2m. She says she'll do it if you agree. Do you? (This is, of course, the plot of a ridiculous semi-cult movie.)
Some elites are always going to engage in degenerate or socially deleterious behavior. There were many Epsteins before Epstein and there will be many after him. Most people willing to spend $10m to fuck are going to find people willing to fulfil their request, no matter how wrong, no matter how illegal. "Should it be allowed" is really an irrelevant question in this respect.
But - and this is something that the progressive understanding of permissiveness doesn't really have space for - there is a big difference between what is illegal but seen as semi-inevitable degeneracy engaged in by small groups at the very bottom and very top of society, and the vast construct of middle-class and working-class morality. Promiscuity is, to some extent, natural. However the fact that both the Byrons and the dockyard whores of this world have always engaged in it doesn't mean that most people benefit from the sexual revolution.
Instead of Hanania's Indecent Proposal, it's best to consider who the majority of Epstein's alleged victims actually were. They were poor girls from West Palm Beach, a poor part of town beset with a high rate of single motherhood and various other social issues with crime and poverty. And they were (allegedly) poor, often Eastern European girls, recruited by Epstein's associates in the Paris modelling world, who come (or at least came, back in the 90s and early 2000s) from a poor and suffering corner of Europe, far away from home, with no support network, put up by the 'agency' in New York apartments owned by Epstein and his brother.
What might actually have made a difference? Stricter divorce laws, more discouraging rather than encouraging of promiscuity, a culture that sees sex as something important, something to do with love and marriage and family rather than something meaninglesss and throwaway. It wouldn’t have stopped all of what happened, of course (as I say above, that’s an impossible task) but it would have saved some. Most who went to Epstein's mansion knew - in as much as a 14 year old can 'know' - "what they were doing". But they thought it was fine, or at least OK, because in a culture in which girls are raised to think that men who pursue them expect sex and that they should readily give it up to them, why not fuck an old guy for a few hundred dollars? Society failed them long before they set foot on his doorstep.
Of course enforcing sexual morality also means making it harder for old men to fuck girls for money, and as in the Russell Brand case I’m happy when they ‘get caught’, because I’ve seen the damage it can do, but men do what they get away with (something much bigger than ‘the law’) in this regard and always have. The largest part of the problem is a spiritual void in which sex is stripped of any real meaning, and therefore seemingly doesn’t matter, and so ‘getting it’ (or ‘giving it up’) in whatever way doesn’t matter. If sex is meaningless, trying to get people to care about who has it is never going to work.
In a way, this reminds me of a similar question around the Rotherham / 'Grooming Gang' scandal. There, as with Epstein, there is a proximate cause (large scale importation of sexually repressed men with certain views on white/'kuffar' women, plus police who didn't want to be 'politically insensitive'). But the ultimate cause is that the scale of the grooming gang scandals would never have been what it was if a more conservative sexual morality had persisted in Britain. The opportunities for the predators in question, whose modus operandi was (primarily) to get young promiscuous teenage girls from broken families very, very drunk, offer them tons of free alcohol and drugs after school and then pimp them out to their friends, simply wouldn't have been present to the same extent in such a culture. Why white (and sometimes Sikh) girls and not Muslims? Because the Muslim girls weren't out drinking on Friday night at 13 or 14 years old, and because they had a father at home who would rock up with a lynch mob if some group of strangers molested his daughter, anyone else be damned.
AmericanSaxeCoburgGothic
Happy to be here! Goal is to post the most exclamation points.
1yr ago
We don't do introductions, while this is the Friday Fun thread, saying hello doesn't offer any room for discussion or anything constructive. For the downvotes (or upvotes) I think they can be ignored, its strangers on the internet.
I've been whistling Good King Wenceslaus to myself since Friday. Don't know why I started but... Can't stop...
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