A lot has happened in Lebanon over these last couple years and I haven't given a breakdown on the situation across the country because I didn't know wtf was going on most of the time. Everything is finally settling down so I think I can approach this now. I'm going to skip the events of the war because I have talked about those already. I'll just compare the situation before and after the war.

Situation October 6

Lebanon is a total shitshow in every possible way. The economy has totally collapsed. The politicians are all the same ones from 1990, the gangsters who were lucky enough to not get car-bombed during the Civil War. The government doesn't function anymore. Even the lowliest civil service job is appointed through patronage from one of the gangs parties based on a complicated scheme where power is divided among a dozen religious sects. That system has broken down and nothing is getting down now. For example they can't remove a pile of 2,000 tons of decaying explosives before it explodes or provide power for more than a few hours per day. The presidency has been vacant for a year because the various factions refuse to compromise with each other.

Background note: The President of Lebanon is elected by the parliament, not a popular vote. He needs a 2/3 vote so there has to be consensus. He must be a Maronite Christian.

Every one of the parties I talk about below are from the civil war. I've written extensively about all of them. It's not really necessary to understand this but if you have any questions about them, I probably answered it there. If you haven't read them, short story: They're all buttholes.

Who is to blame for the impasse? There's a lot to throw around.

• The Sunnis for whatever can't come up with any unifying leader beyond Saad Hariri, who is too busy licking caviar off a whore's nipple in Ibiza to inspire political change.

• The Christians are divided. FPM, a vehicle that the last president used to support his megalomaniacal Napoleon-inspired ambitions. He's way too old now so he's turned it over to his son-in-law who is notorious for being even more corrupt, greedy, and r-slurred than your average Lebanese politician.

• The Lebanese Forces during the war was basically the mafia controlling and "protecting" Christian areas. Now they've reinvented themselves as a political party, but they're still run by literal serial killer whose main job during the war was doing massacres and gang hits against Christian rivals. But now he's got a bunch of r-slurred zoomers supporting him, because hey, who care's about his body count if it was a long time ago?

• Marada is a small Christian party that represents the interests of the Franjieh family, who have strong support in one region of the country and close ties to Syria. Notable because he's Hezbollah's favorite and his opponent in the election Geagea personally murdered his entire family.

• The Druze still are completely loyal to Walid Joumblatt. He knows that his sect is a small minority so he throws his weight behind whoever is going to win. At least when he's not too busy smoking weed and shitposting on Twitter.

• Amal is basically all the Shi'a who don't back Hezbollah. Maybe they're secular. Maybe they're normal Shi'a who just don't buy into Ayatollah Khomeini's Vilayat-e Faqih heresy. They don't have the luxury of idealism since most factions in the country and most regional countries are gunning for the Shi'a right now. Led by Nabih Berri, speaker of parliament and a genius for using political patronage to wheel and deal for what he wants. Lots of blood on his hands too from the war.

Hezbollah is important enough to get more than a bullet point. I don't know what to call this organization. It's an army, a militia, a political party, and a welfare system. They gained a lot of prestige for driving the Israeli occupiers out in 2000 after a long guerilla war. Everyone was like "cool, now that the war is over you can give up your weapons". But they found bullshit excuses to not demobilize and resentment has been building since then. Most of the corruption in the country isn't done directly by them, but they use their military power to block anyone from fixing the government, because if they did it would order them to disarm.

They're in trouble now. A lot of their popularity came from social programs that they did in impoverished mostly-Shi'a areas that the government didn't give a shit about. That was funded by Iran. With the sanctions and general decay of the regime, Iran is in serious trouble and has had to cut their donations way back. The population is really pissed off at the complete breakdown of the government and is smart enough to realize that Hezbollah is cockblocking any effort to reform it to solve their problems.

Even more serious, the Assad regime in Syria has dominated Lebanon for most of the last 60 years. Most of these factions have been allied with them at one time or another, but their power has greatly weakened after the Syrian Civil War left the regime as a crippled fragment of the country. Now it's Hezbollah who are most dependent on them. Iran delivers weapons to them through Syria, so they can't keep building up their rocket arsenal without it.

Israel and Hezbollah have both been remarkably good about keeping the cease-fire since 2006. Hezbollah is deterred by Israel's completely overwhelming military power and the damage they suffered in 2006. Israel is deterred by their humiliating defeat in the ground war in 2006 and Hezbollah's massive arsenal of 150,000 rockets, many of which are long-range precision-guided missiles in the same league as ATACMS.

Now

The situation has radically changed in the last few months, more than I've seen in my life time. To summarize the parts of the war important for us here: It turns out that Hezbollah's huge rocket arsenal was vastly exaggerated by the Israelis. The 150,000 rockets didn't exist. The Israelis have infiltrated their organization to an astonishing degree and kill most of their leadership. The Assad regime collapsed like a wet piece of cardboard.

The good news is that the "Shiite Duo" (Hezbollah and Amal) that has cockblocked any kind of reform in Lebanon is not able to do so any longer. They can't be completely ignored, but they can't stop the nation from making progress. Hezbollah is in complete disarray. Their leaders are dead and every means of communication they have is presumably compromised. Just as they can't coordinate their military forces, they probably can't even come up with any political policy. The collapse of Assad's regime means that they can't rearm and replace the weapons lost in this war.

The general public already was very turned off on them before the war started as they were the most powerful faction so they were most to blame for the country's dysfunction. They might have won some moderate degree in sympathy if they had won victories on the battlefield like in 2006 but their catastrophic military defeats have completely undermined their whole raison d'etre. The said that we have to tolerate a "resistance" group outside of the government's control because they were the only ones who could protect the country against Israeli aggression. That made a lot of sense in 1990s, not very much sense afterward, and it makes no sense now. The completely failed to do any damage with their vaunted rockets and on the ground the IDF was too smart to play their game and just didn't attack. So if you're a Christian, a Sunni, or probably most of the Shi'a who don't have a zealot personality type, all Hezbollah managed to accomplish was to drag the whole country into a war and then lose it. Remind me again, why do we let these people have their own private army?

After the cease-fire a president was finally elected after 2 years. The Shiite Duo stopped insisting on Franjieh, who would never have won because if he's president he might remember that Geagea killed his dog (and the rest of his entire family) and go John Wick on him. The winner is commander of the armed forces Joseph Aoun, no relation to commander of the armed forces Michel Aoun who was the last president. ("Aoun" is like "Smith" and they always go to the army for a compromise candidate.)

Joseph Aoun

He seems like a good choice. He joined the army in 1983. During the Civil War he fought for Michel Aoun against the Lebanese Forces of Samir Geagea in the 1990 "War of Elimination" when the army tried to wipe out the gangsters terrorizing Christians and assert the authority of the state. Notice that I mentioned both of these people above and this is the second presidential candidate who fought against Geagea. Are you guys starting to understand why this soap opera is so interesting?

Word is that he's always been very apolitical and gets along with everyone. He did military training in the USA and Syria. His election is approved by Saudi Arabia, the USA, Qatar, France, all the major factions in Lebanon. (Notice this is the one country in the world where their soveriegnty is such a joke that other countries openly declare which candidate they're voting for.) We can only pray that he ends up like Fuad Chehab, the one successful Lebanese president, who was put into power by the US with the same idea, that he was an apolitical compromise candidate who everyone in the country and the region could accept. He went on to create the good times of the 1960s, so who knows, anything could happen.

Hezbollah is playing hard to get, whining about his choice of prime minister, but this is a negotiation tactic. The other factions, even the Maronite patriarch, have said that nobody will be excluded. By this they mean that Hezbollah will get some representation in the cabinet.

Future

What does the future hold for the Lebanese? Hopefully a hot twink with a nice car who can get you a green card. But we're going to look at the national level.

I am very very cautiously optimistic about this new government. I can't think of a single time since 1975 when there was a government that might be willing and able to act like this is a real adult grown-up country. Not even because of Hezbollah. They were just a symptom. The real problem was the Assad regime. There was no way Lebanon could even try to improve itself as long as that existed. They had their tentacles into every part of society. I don't expect we're gonna see true democracy like the USA in 1864 break out tomorrow, but this is legit the first time most of the people in this country could even begin to start trying to make progress in reforming their political system. I mean heck, they might even start breaking down the barriers between the religious sects like everyone has been promising to do since 1943.

There's a lot of dangers left though. Hezbollah and Assad getting the shit kicked out of them brings a lot of opportunities but there's a lot of potential ways to frick this up. I know I'm a nattering nabob of negativity, but I've been saying for decades that when we get rid of them we have to have a plan for how to replace them.

One immediate concern is the Alawis in Lebanon. They have a neighborhood in Tripoli. The population is, I dunno, maybe 10k. There was a lot of fighting between them and the local (Sunni) population several years ago. Not to mention during the Civil War. Now they're totally isolated deep in the territory of people who have really intense reasons to hate them. There's been a lot of cases of isolated communities like this getting massacred. Although on the bright side, those were during wartime and since the Alawis are no real threat to them anymore they'll probably be fine.

Second is the Shi'a. It's difficult for me to follow what's going on with them because they don't post much in English unless it's straight-up propaganda like al-Manar. What I know is, most of them have zero interest in Hezbollah's corruption, its wars, its heresies imported from Iran, its weirdo restrictions on your social life, among other things. They backed them because there is a real legitimate fear among everyone that the other two sects will gang up and wipe you out. The Lebanese Shi'a now have no friends in the world except Iran, which is completely impotent at the moment with a regime bankrupt financially and morally and on the edge of collapse. In my boomer times, the US would have stepped in to reassure these people that they're not about to get genocided.

Third is the Israelis doing their usual bullshit. Signed a "cease-fire" and kept firing. I guess the implicit understanding was if Hezbollah stops shooting rockets they'll stop blowing away all the apartment buildings in Beirut. In the news they report every little detail of the treaty, but it's understood that most of those are just for show and won't be followed. But Israeli domestic politics once again goes against its national interests. They're not going to leave a couple of the villages on the border that they promised to in the cease-fire. This is very typical of Israeli diplomacy: Always break every agreement a little bit just to remind them that you've got the upper hand and they can't do anything about it. Which dooms them to eventually be in constant war with everyone, but at least in the case of Smotrich and Ben Gvir that's exactly the point. The people they forced out of these villages, Christians and Muslims, are not just going to forget about it. And there's already psycho fringe Israelis trying to build settlements there. They're the fringe now, but once they've got facts on the ground, they'll make sure this keeps going for generations.

Fourth is what Hezbollah does when they're in a corner. In 2006 they won a conventional war which was incredibly shocking. Now their conventional army is destroyed. If they go back to fighting, they're gonna go back to guerilla warfare. And they're really good at that. And if they're really desperate, they'll go back to terrorism. You dipshits call them a "terrorist organization" because you think "terrorist" is a synonym for "bad". They stopped doing terrorism a long time ago but it's not because they found Jesus and became nice. If they get desperate they'll go back to it. And it won't be in Israel.

Hopes

Everything is going right for Lebanon right now except for Israel continuing to bomb them. If the cabinet there just has anybody who wants to accept that they won a war and not prolong it, everything will be fine. The ball is in their court.

/r/games

https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1ibsyaf/us_to_tariff_chips_made_in_taiwan_targeting_tsmc/

/r/technology

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1ibqe2b/trump_to_tariff_chips_made_in_taiwan_targeting/

/r/wsb

https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1ibry0b/trump_to_tariff_chips_made_in_taiwan_targeting/

https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1iblghb/jensen_new_bio_after_deepseek_saga/

https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1ijxhyj/iowa_eliminates_30day_eviction_notice_policy/mbhp9t1/?context=8

"There's that compassionate Christian conservatism and family values again."

Pure fricking evil

https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1ijxhyj/iowa_eliminates_30day_eviction_notice_policy/mbht5lx/?context=8

THREE DAYS NOTICE!

In today's market, even a month can be tight to secure new housing and move all of your worldly possessions

Frick America (Iowa). Late capitalist hellhole.

!g*mers WHO WILL WIN

SO EVERY TIME THE FAKECELS OF !INCELS REJECT MY APPLICATION I CAN INVITE THEM TO !FAKELARPERCUTE TWINKCELS

BREAKING: Democrats just elected David Hogg to be the Vice Chair of the DNC.

Hogg is touted as their face of masculinity to help them regain the young male voters they lost in the 2024 election.

I HONESTLY CAN'T BELIEVE IT! pic.twitter.com/MS4bV0fv79

— George (@BehizyTweets) February 2, 2025

Wait nvm, it's just a framework lol

https://openeurollm.eu/

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989

AI made in 🇪🇺

OpenEuroLLM, the first family of open source Large Language Models covering all EU languages, has earned the first STEP Seal for its excellence.

It brings together EU startups, research labs and supercomputing hosts to train AI on European supercomputers ↓ pic.twitter.com/9YvWBW1CpL

— European Commission (@EU_Commission) February 3, 2025

https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/104200209

https://lemmy.world/post/25074353

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ih6ukk/the_eu_is_betting_56_million_on_open_source_ai/

The South African did another heckerino - in response reddit jannies have taken up their mops in protest to "petition" their userbase about a total ban on Twitter/X links. Numerous subs have already joined, including but not limited to:

r/MadeMeSmile

r/BlueskySocial

r/DnD

r/nba

r/pcgaming

r/newjersey

r/formula1

r/hockey

r/chelseafc

r/boardgames

r/CHIBears

r/ffxiv

r/detroitlions

r/OnePiece

r/steelers

r/ireland

r/magicTCG

r/antiwork (carp added this one with jannie abuse powers hi!!!!!)

Is this totally organic? Will it accomplish anything? Doesn't matter, it's a reddit protest!!

We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system.

We are willing to take in only convicted criminals (including convicted U.S. citizens) into our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee.

The fee would be relatively low for… pic.twitter.com/HTNwtp35Aq

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) February 4, 2025

They are REALLY proud of their gigaprison

RED ALERT!!! OLDEST SPAL VICTIM KNOWN TO DATE ALSO HAS A PEEPEE!!!! Rachel (he/him) then cucks him mid-speech about how it's totally a hermaphrodite dooood not a with a shenis!1!1!!

!metashit eat up!

Here we spot wild Bardfinn Bluesky activities.

Be valid and ping ! bardfinn for something worthwhile or create a new thread.

Wow. 2 million people have viewed my reels in the past 30 days. Is that a lot for some of you? Probably not. To somebody, who just one month ago, bought a new computer brush up on his video editing, and was sitting on a few years of emotionally-charged raccoon footage he didn't think he'd ever get around to? It's fantastic.

Swipe on over to my reels tab to see what I've been working on (I keep them separate from my posts). There's some car stuff, mostly raccoon stuff, and a lot of repeats as I figured out what worked, what didn't, and realized all of the different ways I could cut the footage.

I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much footage I have of One, Two, and Four's short life. It's taken about two years for me to be able to watch it, but now that I have I am so glad I've had the opportunity to share them with the world. They were truly the best raccoons I've ever had, and I've had a lot of raccoons pass through my life. I plan on doing something more long-form with the footage at some point, but my creativity needs a recharge as I'm getting quite frustrated with the process.

For those of you who've endured this somewhat obsessive and absolutely obnoxious episode, I thank you. Things will likely be slowing down now, however, as I'm running out of good footage and time to waste.

Here's hoping somebody brings me some orphaned babies this spring.

______________________

On a more serious note, thank you, rDrama for putting up with my bullshit. For a select few of you though, go frick yourselves and just ignore it if you don't like it lmao. My goal for the month was to become a raccoon influencer on IG and goddarn I did it. What have you accomplished this month that was so great?

!g*mers @kaamrev

https://github.com/deepseek-ai/Janus/blob/main/janus_pro_tech_report.pdf

USA lost, China Won, glory to the CCP!

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42843131

BREAKING: DeepSeek officially announces another open-source AI model, Janus-Pro-7B.

This model generates images and beats OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion across multiple benchmarks. pic.twitter.com/FSJkelcaYP

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) January 27, 2025

NEWS: DeepSeek just dropped ANOTHER open-source AI model, Janus-Pro-7B.

It's multimodal (can generate images) and beats OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion across GenEval and DPG-Bench benchmarks.

This comes on top of all the R1 hype. The 🐋 is cookin' pic.twitter.com/yCmDQoke0f

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) January 27, 2025

JUST IN:

Another blow is coming from the Chinese DeepSeek AI

They launched now a multimodal "Janus-Pro-7B" model with image input and output. pic.twitter.com/akEfi9Zyzq

— Megatron (@Megatron_ron) January 27, 2025

🚨

DeepSeek just dropped ANOTHER open-source AI model, Janus-Pro-7B.

It's multimodal (can generate images) and beats OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion across GenEval and DPG-Bench benchmarks. pic.twitter.com/HVB1wBns1z

— Liang Wenfeng 梁文锋 (@LiangWenfeng_) January 27, 2025

DeepSeek open-sources Janus Pro, beating Stable Diffusion and OpenAI's DALL-E 3🤯 pic.twitter.com/C50jQGHOHl

— Casper Hansen (@casper_hansen_) January 27, 2025

WAIT A SECOND, DeepSeek just dropped Janus 7B (MIT Licensed) - multimodal LLM (capable of generating images too) 🔥 pic.twitter.com/2kzaCJfLPt

— Vaibhav (VB) Srivastav (@reach_vb) January 27, 2025

https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/104075936

https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/104077316

https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/104077293

https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ibd5x0/deepseek_releases_deepseekaijanuspro7b_unified/

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ibe4j7/deepseek_drops_multimodal_januspro7b_model/

https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1ibdhct/once_you_think_theyre_done_deepseek_releases/

https://old.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1ibfed1/news_deepseek_just_dropped_another_opensource_ai/

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ibdyou/deepseek_just_dropped_janus_7b_mit_licensed/

https://old.reddit.com/r/China_irl/comments/1ibg4mh/deepseek%E5%88%9A%E5%8F%91%E5%B8%83%E4%BA%86%E5%8F%A6%E4%B8%80%E6%AC%BE%E5%BC%80%E6%BA%90ai%E6%A8%A1%E5%9E%8Bjanuspro%E5%A4%9A%E6%A8%A1%E6%80%81%E6%A8%A1%E5%9E%8B%E5%85%B6%E4%B8%ADjanuspro7b%E5%9C%A8%E6%B5%8B%E8%AF%95%E4%B8%AD/

https://hexbear.net/post/4363677?scrollToComments=false

https://hexbear.net/post/4364578?scrollToComments=false

BlueSky:

DeepSeek has released a new set of multimodal AI models that it claims can outperform OpenAI’s DALL-E 3.The models are part of a new model family that DeepSeek is calling Janus-Pro. They range in size from 1 billion to 7 billion parameters.Read more here: tcrn.ch/40Bc5Qm

— TechCrunch (@techcrunch.com) 2025-01-27T21:38:20.589Z

https://rdrama.net/post/337205/deepseek-drops-multimodal-januspro7b-model-beating

https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/6/404

"And, peculiarly, Civ 7 only really covers history up to about 1950. You get planes and tanks, but there are no home computers or helicopters in this tech tree at launch. The final science victory condition is launching the first manned spaceflight – quite a step back from setting up an exoplanet colony"

Previous post this is a follow-up to

https://rdrama.net/post/338283/man-gets-executed-for-flirting-with

Today had a bit of an interesting development.

Quick reminder for those who forgot because a flew a helicopter into your cerebral cortex

Hermitcraft, upon receiving the proof that Iskall dared to flirt with adult women in private, gave the man 90 mins to respond before axing him and scorching his career

Several Hermitcraft members have come out to post on Twitter, and Twitter in response to Iskall's video talking about his "cancellation"

All of these are vague and nebulous, but very obvious what they are referencing.

Welsknight Gaming

That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.

-Dayna Craig, "The Narcissist's Prayer"

— Welsknight Gaming (@WelsknightPlays) January 31, 2025

What an interesting thing to say...

He's essentially saying that Iskall deserves to have his income and reputation uprooted without even caring to hear what his side of the story.

Also interesting to note that Welsknight is barely even part of Hermitcraft as it is, his last upload being over 6 months ago. Only uploading dogshit 2012 lets plays nobody gives a shit about.

ZombieCleo

Never argue with someone who believes their own lies.

— ZombieCleo (@zombiecleo.bsky.social) 2025-01-30T19:15:40.548Z

>Replies disabled

I guess even blue sky wasn't safe enough.

Interesting that she calls him a liar, but I have no idea what he even arguably lied about in his video when he straight up confirms that he did flirt with women, and he just says it's my private life.

ImpulseSV

Great quote from a great movie:

“It's funny how all living organisms are alike...when the chips are down, when the pressure is on, every creature on the face of the Earth is interested in one thing and one thing only. it’s own survival.”

(In the voice of Skizz) Name it!

— impulseSV (@impulseSV) January 31, 2025

>Quote is from film "Liar Liar"

Once again calling him a liar, but not sure what the frick he lied about....

Also very interesting to pick a quote which frames you as the one trying to destroy the "organisms life". Thats a bad look sweaty

GoodTimesWithScar

Old movie posters hit hard. pic.twitter.com/qxoUDY3wpx

— GoodTimesWithScar (@GTWScar) January 31, 2025

Film poster of the film Gaslamp

Yeah that awful thing Iskall did by flirting with women.... He's gaslamping you into thinking it's normal....

Additional reply from GeminiTay to above tweet

hehe were so quirky!!! Lucky movie references cant be used in a deformation lawsuit against a public figure teehee

And as all these tweets came out at the same time, it's very obvious this is coordinated and not just me being a schizo

In fact people mention this in the comments to Scar's tweet as well.

... I thought scar already had a steel chair

All of this vague posting is like a Teenage girl posting "deep" lyrics on her Facebook after a break-up

Genuinely pathetic. I'd respect them a lot more if they just straight up tweeted "Iskall keep yourself safe"

But yes this continues to be crazy how big of a response and attempt to erase the mans reputation of seemingly nothing.

I kind of want to believe there's some truly horrid stuff we don't know about that is the cause behind this awful behavior.

But the Minecraft space is filled with the worse people possible that it's entirely likely they are all just backstabbing snakes all the way through.

!meowr

Shouldn't have created a party entirely of white mages

For context, if you use the progressive stack award, your posts are (temporarily) treated as if they have 2x their actual upmarseys. This was thought of as so powerful by the jannies that it costs 1500 coins for just 6 hours. Now, if you make a post that gets 140 upmarseys, and at the same time someone makes an effortpost that gets 30 upmarseys, or chud ragebait that gets 50 upmarseys, your post will actually be below them on the front page. In fact, since upmarseys are basically normally distributed (getting 30 upmarseys is pretty average, getting 90 makes yours one of the top posts of the day, getting 150 would make it the top post of the day), any sort of multiplier would change the content of the front page immensely, let alone a multiplier so large it treats mediocre effortposts and slightly above average chud ragebait as superior to the actual top post as chosen by users.

The fact that /h/chudrama is blocked by default is irrelevant, because most active users have it unblocked, so even if you block /h/chudrama every post you make is still effectively being deranked. And besides, there are plenty of people who want to read /h/chudrama and not have it be literally the only thing they see on the front page

!nonchuds