Bulletins and News Discussion from September 16th to September 22nd, 2024 - This Megathread Is Dedicated To The Brave Mujahideen Fighters of Afghanistan - COTW: Afghanistan

Image is of China's ambassador to Afghanistan, Zhao Sheng, meeting Taliban Prime Minister Hasan Akhund in September 2023.

I know the Rambo title card is a hoax.

The COTW was chosen in the wake of the aborted sequel to the attempted assassination of Trump being performed by a guy who is VERY enthusiastic about Ukraine, to the point of trying to sneak Afghan soldiers into Ukraine by setting up a house in Pakistan to house them and then further transport them. He also apparently offered to send thousands of Afghan soldiers to Haiti to help them combat gang violence. Whomst among us doesn't have the numbers of thousands of Afghan soldiers on speed-dial. Do you reckon there's a group chat?

Anyway, while there is still no official recognition of the Taliban's government by any country, China has taken a different course than the late USSR and the US - forming economic in-roads, rather than trying their own invasion. This has been a big boon for the struggling country, with various mines and oil and agriculture deals helping keep things barely afloat. A total disintegration of the social fabric of Afghanistan is not in the interest of any of the powers that border it - China, Pakistan, and Iran, with Russia not too far away - so an interesting dynamic of helping-without-official-recognition has been established. I wonder who will be the first country to fully recognize them?

The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.

The Country of the Week is Afghanistan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

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1.6K comments

Говорит Шестиугольный Медведь!
Сообщение Совинформбюро!
Модераторы 1-го Международного информационного фронта под командованием фельдмаршала Советского Союза 72 трлн при поддержке 1-го Украинского информационного фронта под командованием фельдмаршала Советского Союза Карпа Правда завершила уничтожение мировой группы Лемми фашистских войск после упорных уличных боев!
А сегодня, 17 сентября, они полностью захватили столицу нацистского мира Лемми, город Лэнгли, штат Вирджиния!
Центр империализма Лемми и центр агрессии Лемми.
Hi, I'm here to announce that Hexbear's News Comm is going to be changing the rules of the comm in order to better modernize rules that haven't been changed since the founding of hexbear or have been added slap-shod in the heat of the moment to address pressing issues of the day.
With that in mind, we of the News Comm mod team have decided to add an element of democracy to the process of modernizing the comm's rules by opening the floor to the participants of the comm to both propose new rules, edit or strike old rules, and after deliberation by the mod team, voting yea or nay on the finalized slate.
If you wish to participate by making proposals, please make a comment in reply to this pinned comment with your proposed motion. For your proposed motion to move to deliberation by the mod team, we'll be requiring a minimum floor of 21 votes (20 unique votes plus your own comment's initial vote).
An example of this could be "Proposal to editing the old rule 4 on twitter links from nitter.com to xcancel or any other twitter mirror that does not require an account, while also striking the section referring to the firefox extension, making it
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also xcancel.com (or another alternative instance). ~~There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ .~~ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
End proposal"
Proposals that meet the minimum required votes will be brought to the floor in a private chamber for deliberation by the mod team and proposals will be discussed, edited should minor adjustments be needed, and finally voted upon to accept it as a part of the final draft or to table it from discussion. (by the way we called the chatroom we're gonna be chattering about all your ideas "The Central Committee of the news mega" You can either be jealous or mirthful of the level of Larping we're doing for this event)
After a set amount of time for accepting new proposals, discussing, and voting upon them, we'll do another one of these pinned comments presenting each accepted proposed rule for a simple thumbs up-thumbs down vote. After a set period of voting, we'll confirm the results and edit the Comm rules to reflect the new changes. (The voting system will look like Comment with proposal and two reply comments with a silly emoji and text saying "Yea" and "Nay")
Alright my little war piggies, its time to run wild!
- i don't have any proposals (i'd personally prefer if there were fewer navel-gazing meta posts --i don't need to read 100 comments about how there are 100 comments), but i'd just like to reiterate, the news mega is the biggest value-add of the site, and i hope whatever changes are made are consistent with its current character.
- New rule proposal:
  No low-effort top-level comments that consist only of wishing for things.
  This is probably phrased poorly but I think comments like “if I were Iran I would simply start WWIII” or
  should be in the replies. Fantasy geopolitics games people play in their heads isn’t news related imo.
  More developed opinions/analysis in the vein of “Iran should strike x facility because it would critically damage the Zionist entity” should be allowed though.
- Should add archive.org as an archiving option because archive.ph blocks VPNs with annoying captchas
  
  I prefer archive.org links, but sometimes archive.org gets hung up on paywalls when alternatives still manage to work. But that's good to know.
- Thoughts. The mega-war comments were kinda cringe (esp vis a vis trans mega although I don’t think there was bad intent, hope not) and I wished people self policed more. (Not shaming anyone, bandwagons happen and now it’s corrected.) It seems these comments have been minimized and I appreciate the mod work on this. I don’t think it’s an issue anymore.
  The “innocent” OT (and “oops wrong mega”) I appreciate as long as there are not too many.
  The news mega is a community and sometimes I have an issue or topic that I’d like feedback and engagement on from my news comrades here. This is a common phenomenon across special interest groups, you become friendly and wish to expand the range of conversation or you wish to tap the knowledge base. (I suppose my saying this could be interpreted as a reason for More Moderation in news mega to ensure that other comms get love. It’s not my call.) Maybe a pinned comment to contain OT? Did someone else suggest that? Or what if we make a post in another targeted comm and leave a pointer here in the news mega. I’ve pointed to a news comm story in the news mega - and got positive feedback from a couple who had missed it.
  Re doomer stuff. Let people vent, and use the reply. We all learn and so will the libs who wander in.
  
  The news mega is a community and sometimes I have an issue or topic that I’d like feedback and engagement on from my news comrades here
  On this, personally I am a lot more tolerant of off topic or only tangentially on topic material from people who regularly contribute on topic material to the threads compared to randoms. @LargePenis@hexbear.net is a good example - he posts some OT stuff but he also brings his A game talking about Lebanon and Syria.
  
  I always thought the mega-war comments were fun and lighthearted
  
  You're not wrong, it's just that they were becoming a little too frequent and generated nothing useful, when I think most people come here to gain information and not so much to have fun and shoot the shit
- I second this
  
  Honestly have no idea what's going on lol
- I want to to prose a rule for no defeatism? and also for "nothing ever happens" stuff? I dunno how to word that properly for the best so if someone knows how to word it better? but it is really annoying seeing others saying nothing ever happens, when things are always happening, and trivializing things as if all of this is entertainment. Then there the defeatist side of stuff to where I understand the grief that comes from these things, but to say everything is all over isn't right. It's also very disrespectful to, like for example, towards everything the axis of resistance has done
  
  defeatism
  the news mega should try to provide clear-eyed and varied analysis; to insist that everything is going to plan, and to restrict posts to only those that take an optimistic-spin on world events, would be QAnon-esque cope, imho.
  
  I don't think it's fair to compare it to QAnon-esque cope. Perhaps an alternative would maybe be requiring a cw spoiler tag then for very defeatist stuff?
  
  A content warning for "defeatism?" I'm sorry, but isn't this a bit silly?
  Frankly, the left loses a lot more often, and for a lot longer, than it wins, and it's not defeatist to face up to that fact or to express frustration with it.
  
  No, there's a difference between discussing the Ls and thinking the cause is lost with just one L. And most of the time, the doomerism is entirely unwarranted. People were losing their shit when Ukraine launched their doomed excursion into Russian territory and despite the repeated assurance from more sober minded people that the excursion was doomed, too many people were losing their shit and spreading doomer takes until it turned out Ukraine predictably wasn't able to do what the Swedes, French, and Germans failed to do.
  Doomerism is technically reactionary. There's a reason why revolutionary optimism is a thing, why "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" gets repeated. In regards to the pager attack, this is fine while this is doomer nonsense. Someone personally feeling emotionally distraught over an L doesn't give them license to dump those negative feelings onto the rest of us. Those negative emotional dumping almost never comes with analysis anyways, certainly not good analysis.
  
  People were losing their shit when Ukraine launched their doomed excursion into Russian territory and despite the repeated assurance from more sober minded people that the excursion was doomed
  I am once again asking news mega posters to read clausewitz
  
  maybe not a fair characterization.
  i should still not like doomer stuff to be removed by the mods; other posters and the community at large should be responsible for correcting and responding as necessary -- as Harry notes, we lose all the time, and its good practice to notice this and find the strength and support to keep the faith up.
  
  Except the cope is coming from the doomers, who pop into this thread every time Ukraine has a PR victory to gloat/whinge. It’s a purely emotional and selfish reaction, not analysis
  
  You are jumping at shadows if you think there is some horde of ukraine-NAFO doomers waiting to pounce on these threads. I've read every post in the newsmegas since the beginning. Idiots stumble in, to be sure, but it is not a meaningful pattern.
  
  "Nothing ever happens" is undialectical. The dialectic is ever in motion. What seems like nothing happening is actually contradictions pushing against each other towards a temporary equilibrium, but one contradiction will eventually overcome the other.
  
  My only ~~problem~~ concern with this is that defeatism is extremely subjective. Every NAFO shithole on the Internet strictly moderates "defeatism" and the end result is a perspective completely detached from reality. On here, people will make shitposts (e.g. a day or two after the occupation of Kursk, someone was like "has anybody told Putin about this yet") and people will get really bent out of shape over inconsequential banter.
  I think, foremost, we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously. Whether we are blooming or dooming, it is not like the Axis of Resistance is loading up Hexbear dot net every day and taking cues from our big brain analysis. The Russian MOD isn't reading our shitposts to decide where to commit their resources. The soldiers of Hezbollah and Ansarallah are not going to be deterred from the righteous path because a handful of westoids are suddenly feeling uneasy. BRICS isn't going to unravel just because there are skeptics of dedollarization among us.
  We should deter outright panic, but this is a news discussion forum and let me tell ya, most of the news is bad.
  The global workers movement has already been defeated. We are only now, two generations later, beginning to claw our way out of the tomb we were buried in at the end of the cold war, and there are still many setbacks ahead of us.
  
  can we at least agree to remove top level comments like this:
  As someone whose phone occasionally heats up, all I can say is that we need to put down the copium. If Israel can do this, so can the CIA. It is highly likely that the age of mass communication is about to functionally end as soon as we reach the societal breakdown stage of late capitalism. As for Lebanon itself, it will likely collapse before Israel does. The zionists likely plan to genocide everyone within the borders of greater israel.
  This is pretty cut and dry defeatism, without adding any type of factual analysis.
  
  Yeah, there are a handful of egregious examples like this. Even this comment though, has the potential for some fruitful analysis if it weren't such a low effort throwaway.
  As for Lebanon itself, it will likely collapse before Israel does.
  You could make this argument. The Lebanese Republic is deeply dysfunctional and probably moribund, with or without Israeli intervention, whereas "Israel," even at the bottom of the deepest crisis in its history, with the overwhelming support of the US and it's lousy dogs, has already survived long past its expiration date.
  But there are a lot more details to the way this will play out than the picture this poster is painting. The weakness of the Lebanese state is a significant factor in why Hezbollah is able to take matters into their own hands in the first place. Considering Hezbollah is significantly more powerful than the Lebanese army, and politically more coherent (in the literal sense) than the Republic, whatever happens to the government in Beirut seems kind of immaterial as far as "Israel" achieving its objectives goes. They aren't going to just march north and expand "Greater Israel." They are going to face intense resistance, in greater numbers, with greater armaments than they have in Gaza, which they still haven't managed to pacify.
  So yeah, the "state of Israel" very well might outlive the state of Lebanon, but so will Hezbollah, so what changes exactly?
  
  I would not be surprised if this user doesn’t realize Hezbollah and the Lebanese government are different entities. The commonality in these overly broad doom prophecies is a lack of granular detailed knowledge.
  
  Re boredom: I demand they use more emojis in their posts. That's all. They can keep the doom-posting bc that means we get to meme in the replies.
  
  was that Boredom? I've been seeing a lot of questionable takes from that one
  
  They wanted China to annex a part of Myanmar and not even the part of Myanmar that's right next to China but the part of Myanmar that borders Thailand.
  
  Yes it was, of “evo morales is a coca addict who legalized child labor and I don’t even want to KNOW his opinion on the age of consent” fame
  
  Here here comrade!
  
  I don't believe in the "nothing ever happens" nonsense, things change.
  But I look at 2014 headlines on Israeli crimes in Gaza, it's the same shit repeating at a larger scale.
  
  Don’t read anything from the 20th century on Palestine because it’s the same thing all the way down
  
  No wrongthink guys
  
  woke: Blooming
  broke: Dooming
  bespoke: Zooming
- I like the news mega as it is. I don't feel a need for more rules.
  People here are nice. A little bit of goofing off is okay, and I don't think there are too many low effort posts.
  The mods are doing a fine job already.
  
  Seriously, this all just seems pretty unnecessary
  Frankly any time there's discussions on this site about rules and moderation changing it just spirals into negativity and witch hunting
- Any top level comment that isn't a news article or in some way an effort post (doesnt have to be expansive but shouldn't just be a short, personal reaction about an event) should be removed. Totally fine as replies to a higher level comment, but having the top level comments retain higher quality would be incredibly nice.
- Have a pinned post every newsthread for editorials, rants about current affairs and opinion columns.
  
  What is the purpose of specially marking opeds like this? What does this gain over just posting them like everything else?
  
  maybe it would catch some of the chatter that while fun is not strictly news
  this could bridge the overlap between the general megathreads and newsthreads
  there could be a guideline of minimum length or some encouragement to effortpost
  overall I think the newsthreads are fine as they are but this could be a fun experiment
- personally, besides a few dramaticisms and other oddities from the general site culture that show up from time to time, this place is fine as it is, developing too many restrictions might lead to another dunk/dredge tank-style unnecessary split or whatever.
- New rule proposal: only I can make "First" comments.
- I would go against banning anything that isn't already against the rules. Some comments happen in years. In other weeks comments happen where words occur. In other words days happen where comments annoy someone but it's all in good spirit
- I'd like everyone onw to know I'm running third party on this. So vote for me if you don't like either option in this sham election designed to suck up all the oxygen in the room and in your brains.
  
  apologies, but this election is way too important to allow the people to vote for the wrong option. the best you can do is start a News Mega Uncommitted Movement
- No Homers
  end proposal (love your work comrades)
- Half of the "best" weeks in this mega were weeks like when Wagner rebelled and a significant portion of the posts were jokes tangentially related to news events. I get deleting comments about competing with the trans mega but this mega should have a lighter touch. More rules are just going overboard.