breakfastmtn

breakfastmtn , 9 hours ago (edited 7 hours ago)

BBC just reported that Iranian state media has confirmed their deaths:

President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and several others are confirmed to have been killed in Sunday's helicopter crash in north-western Iran, state TV says.

breakfastmtn OP , 1 day ago

I think that's one of the meanings. If a Russian loss led to the sudden collapse of the Russian state or a radical retraction of the Russian economy, who knows what the consequences would be?

I don't think that's a justification for not letting Russia lose, but it is a big bag of who-the-fuck-knows.

breakfastmtn OP , 1 day ago

The concern isn't about the consequences faced by Russia, but the impact on the rest of the world. Like, if Russia were to collapse, I think most would agree that Egyptians don't deserve to find out what suddenly not having $1.7 billion in wheat would mean, right? I don't think anyone has any idea what that would mean for, say, Tajikistan and other post-Soviet states with economies closely tied to Russia. Collapse would be chaos and it wouldn't stay confined within Russia's borders.

And, again, I don't think that justifies preventing Russia from losing. There are worse concerns for Russia winning. And the idea that Russia neither winning nor losing could be a sustainable final state is probably a fantasy.

breakfastmtn OP , 1 day ago

It's complicated. They don't have the ability to bring down the government but both Gantz and Gallant are much more popular than Netanyahu. Netanyahu's choice (again) comes down to placating the far-right to keep his government in power in the short-term at the expense of further alienating the Israeli public. If he bows to this pressure, the far-right might topple his government immediately. All paths probably lead to electoral (then legal) doom for Netanyahu at some point.

breakfastmtn OP , 1 day ago

Netanyahu doesn't need Gantz's party to remain in power. They'd lose a more moderate voice in the war cabinet. The Unity government would probably lose legitimacy in the eyes of most Israelis. It would be very bad for Netanyahu politically. It would also probably be good for Gantz politically, as recent polling suggests that he might be starting to get some of Netanyahu's stink on him.

breakfastmtn OP , 2 days ago

It was initially incorrectly reported that she was alive and unconscious. This isn't a new correction. She was declared dead in late October after investigators identified a piece of her skull:

A source involved with her identification told CNN Louk’s death was announced after forensic examiners found a bone fragment from her skull.

The bone fragment was from the petrous part of the temporal bone, which is at the base of the skull, normally near the carotid artery, a major blood vessel that provides blood to the brain. A DNA test concluded the fragment belonged to Louk.

. . .

The bone fragment, combined with the circumstances surrounding the October 7 attack and video that appeared to show Louk unconscious on the back of a Hamas truck, led investigators to conclude these were her remains.

breakfastmtn , 2 days ago

Archive link.

breakfastmtn , 2 days ago

On top of knowing who you are, where you are, whether you're single or married, whether or not you have children, where you work, when you work, what your interests are, what your embarrassing interests are, etc. etc. etc.

People are weirdly blase about this but, if you use TikTok regularly, they have such a wealth of information about you that an intelligence agency would find it trivial to compromise you. You're just gambling that you're not worth compromising.

breakfastmtn OP , 3 days ago

They haven't been training Ukrainian troops in-country since the start of the full-scale invasion. The US in particular pulled all their troops out about 10 days before Russia invaded.

breakfastmtn , 5 days ago

The NYT coverage says:

The change came because the United Nations switched to citing a more conservative source for its numbers — the Gazan Ministry of Health — rather than using Gaza’s Government Media Office, as it had in recent weeks.

. . .

That Gaza media office has consistently provided an overall death toll similar to the one given by the ministry of health, but different and often higher figures for the number of women and children killed.

Ismail Al Thawabateh, the office’s director general, said in an interview that the health ministry listed and categorized an individual as dead only when all of their details had been documented and verified by a next of kin. He did not explain why his office used a breakdown of women and children based on the overall death toll.

Most of the coverage, including this Guardian piece, makes it sound like they switched to a different dataset but this sounds like a switch to a different source. The HM numbers have generally been regarded as accurate -- historically, at least. I don't think that the media office has that same reputation. It seems like the previous numbers were calculated from the HM's total death toll figure, and not from observed data. I'm not really sure what that means for interpreting the numbers.

Archive

breakfastmtn OP , 6 days ago

People say the same thing literally any time there's a negative story about Hamas. That isn't how this story is framed. Israeli policy (blockade) and military are not portrayed as a relative good at all. It also speaks directly against a narrative by some Israelis that Palestinians bear collective responsibility for the actions of Hamas.

The idea that we must help Hamas cover up their crimes is a bad one, however well-intentioned. If they don't want their crimes and misdeeds reported by the world, they should consider not committing any.

breakfastmtn OP , 9 days ago

A U.S. State Department spokesperson would not say if the United States was monitoring any particular site in Belarus, but said the department is keeping a close eye on the situation in order “to ensure Russia maintains control of its weapons in the event of any deployment to Belarus and upholds its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.” An April 2024 State Department report said that the U.S. would not change its nuclear posture in response to the developments in Belarus.

What in the article makes you think that governments don't know about this? I'd gamble that there's about a 0% chance that this is news to military intelligence.