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.

https://old.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1iht4so/mpr_news_trump_administration_launches/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1iht578/mpr_news_trump_administration_launches/

Also kill Connecticut.

https://old.reddit.com/r/StamfordCT/comments/1ihlrfj/stamford_board_of_reps_calls_special_meeting/

Chicago is also full of nazis and they should all be killed

https://old.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/1ihx4c5/white_supremacist_remark_sparks_city_council/

The Australians are all Nazis and the abo-eaters must be gunned down and the land returned to the indigineous people

https://old.reddit.com/r/AustralianPolitics/comments/1ii7qki/as_antisemitism_strains_australian_social/

Hecko!

Yesterday night, I decided to try and get some sweet xitter likes by doing the classic move of pissing people off.

For those who do not know, Technoblade was am extremely popular Minecraft youtuber, who used to be part of the DreamSMP.

also most importantly, he's dead.

Died of bone cancer in mid 2022. And every year since then he's friends have gotten together to use his death for charity. The most recent example being yesterday from other large Minecraft youtuber, and drama QUEEN TommyInnit

In response I threw a tweet out into the ether, making fun of them doing this.

I know nothing about these people.
But didn't this dude die like 5 years ago?
How many times are you going to dance around a corpse for money? pic.twitter.com/ncSjemPdw1

— gerg (@_gergYT) January 22, 2025

And while I did not get many likes or views on X.

I did quite well on REDDIT

https://old.reddit.com/r/MinecraftMemes/comments/1i7syde/umm_what/

3.2k upmarseys and the thread got Ya'lled.

(check thread for funny upset children, a lot got deleted by internet jannies, and Im too lazy to select a few)

Then just do a charity drive, at some point it's ridiculous. You think they are gonna be "raising money for Technoblade" 20 years later too?

It's beating a quite literally dead horse

— gerg (@_gergYT) January 22, 2025

Surprisingly a lot of people seem to know where I'm coming from but I just "worded it badly" (Worded it DRAMATICALLY more like it)

And a lot of other people have said they are unsubscribing from me due to my horrible PR.

I'm sure this has done irreversible damage to my reputation and I will never recover....

Top Drama

Relative Drama (takes into account the size of the subreddit)

autodrama: returning jobs to dramneurodivergents. Ping HeyMoon if there are any problems or you have a suggestion

I bet whoever made this is really embarrassed now.

Sorry guys, no rebuilding your fancy houses that burned down by the ocean in LA until there’s a new crack den installed right in the middle of the neighborhood.

The area is like D+43; this seems fair. I don’t make the rules 🤷‍♂️. pic.twitter.com/SVXM5cSCnH

— Joe Lonsdale (@JTLonsdale) January 31, 2025

https://old.reddit.com/r/xxfitness/comments/1iciz0r/comment/m9r2mgb/?context=8

epilogue: lol a few top level comments seething that I don't even post there and am not a woman got deleted and banned and someone in the jannie response got banned too

All the karma I lost on the nms sub earlier trying to explain that Elon is a neurodivergent African American immigrant has been recouped too and I am safe from a shadowbanning

As part of my Banlog, I am somewhat inclined to give @BIGBILLYKONGDONG a serious ban for the outrageous boomerphilia on display.

As a work of ironic praise for a 78 year old man's fantasy, it's a solid piece. Truly let us celebrate that we are all collectively engaged in a public arts project to facilitate the transition of boomers out of public life.

It's truly funny that we are all pretending that this old man is a president. That he is mentally capable, and not just lashing out with random whims with other aged decrepit men. The elaborate practical joke we're pulling on our elderly is a riot of laffs.

But:

For me the choice is easy.

I don't really know why I'm venting my frustrations here, but I guess this is one of the only real pro-Ukraine communities on the internet I am aware of,

sure sure nowhere is pro Ukraine sure sure

if you are a fed PLEASE DM me

no really, it bothers me but not like it does some people

i have my excuses (my spine is deteriorating haha) but it is what it is

worst part imo is how far ive come. i used to be a pure antisocial shut in, but it took until my mid 20s to become social. people seem to view me as charismatic now.

im going to ask a girl out soon. ive been on a few dates but its been way too long. i have no money and no car (of my own) so frick it why not.

but there's plenty of things in life that make me happy. my r-slurred cat is sitting on me and i love her so much, but shes making my legs way too hot, but i love her so ill endure it until i cant and then tell her i love her

of course i kinda wanna die but thats more due to the constant crippling pain. lol

its like 3am and i kinda want to kiss my self right now. haha

is it genuinely over? AMA, talk shit, give advice, manifest destiny, idc, i clearly just need attention. i just want to hold someone in my arms thst genuinely wants to be there with me. xD

Nothing screams ‘future’ like a 74 year old leading a chant next to an 86 year old while a 77 year old vigorously shakes his cane in support. https://t.co/nmPWv5Jdua

— Peter Meijer (@RepMeijer) February 6, 2025

I can't believe what I just listened to. The DNC Leader interrupted the party election to tell members that not enough non-binary candidates have been elected, so they MUST now vote for one.

"With the results of the previous four elections, our elected officers are currently two… pic.twitter.com/8CelMVzyE6

— George (@BehizyTweets) February 1, 2025

pic.twitter.com/sl8xfeNjGk

— Stonetoss Comics (@stone_toss) February 6, 2025

Please weigh in on this latest effort:

Enter BetHe will! - 10 bets

Enter BetHe will not! - 45 bets

Enter BetJoe Exotic and/or Trump and/or Aevann will die before the deadline of this bet. - 5 bets

Option 3 supersedes option 2.

!bets !goomble !goomblers !goombling !project2025 !tigerfrickers

Closed.

The rate of obesity in particular rose steeply, doubling in adults between 1990 and 2021 to more than 40 percent — and nearly tripling, to 29 percent, among girls and women aged 15 to 24.

I am so happy for our girls

"Obesity comes from genetic, physiological and environmental interactions," she said. "It's not the fault of any one individual who has the disease."

I agree father mother skinny daughter fat, genetic not her fault

Completely unsurprised. Have been watching this happen for about the last 20 years. Watching school kids get more and more overweight, compared to my high school days in the 80's, where there were only 2-3 what would be called "obese" kids in my class of 300. And they weren't even THAT big.

Go to a flea market in the U.S now on a weekend. That is a real eye-opener, to the current mass obesity phenomenon ..

We are headed for the space ships of Wall-E ...

I spend 3 years in high school with 12 foid classmates and 2 were overweight rest obese to super obese. I respected them a lot

I remember once's when they started talking about guys and what they like I was like this

Because I thought they were delusional to think they don't deserve what they want obviously, they first and all were for me genderless persons.

So they coped by calling me gay because I never hit on any of them

$?2?

We also funded a video game about "counter-disinformation" because the State department is the enemy of fun. https://t.co/nzECgRzoMt pic.twitter.com/DnhMJTohbr

— Second City Bureaucrat (@CityBureaucrat) February 4, 2025

https://screenrant.com/matrix-sequels-tank-marcus-chong-not-return-reason/

After playing such an integral role in The Matrix, Tank (Marcus Chong, adopted son of Tommy Chong) didn't appear in either of the sequels, The Matrix Reloaded or The Matrix Revolutions, with many viewers wondering why. As the operator of the Nebuchadnezzar, Tank plays a pretty crucial role on the team in the first movie, making his disappearance surprising. That's especially true due to the fact Tank was one of the few Nebuchadnezzar crew members to even survive Cypher's betrayal of his comrades. In 2003's The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions, Tank is instead replaced by his brother-in-law, Link (Harold Perrineau Jr).

It's explained in-universe that Tank died sometime after the first Matrix movie, though no cause is given. It's a simple explanation hiding a complicated behind-the-scenes story. The real reason Tank didn't come back for the admittedly quite divisive Matrix sequels was a conflict between actor Marcus Chong and the producers. Said conflict got incredibly heated, leading to legal battles, and Chong making shocking allegations against his former colleagues and bosses. Needless to say, Chong's career has never truly recovered.

TLDR for the original matrix he got paid $75k (in 1999 is worth approx. $142k today) and for the sequel demanded the same pay as the other 3 or 4 main characters who actually survived the first matrix movie too lol who were all offered like a million ( approx. $1.9 million today) but they refused to pay him more than 400k (approx. $757k today)

While Tank died in the canon The Matrix timeline, there was a behind-the-scenes reason for this creative decision. In 2003, Chong filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros/AOL Time Warner, claiming that there was a verbal agreement from 1998 and a contract signed in 2000 that guaranteed him a place in the sequel movies. Warner offered him $400,000 for The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, and he wanted to get $1 million, and Chong wouldn't budge (via entertainment.ie).

The lawsuit included claims of defamation, stating that the producers tried to paint him as a terrorist. In October 2000, Chong was arrested for making threatening phone calls to Warner Bros and writer-directors the Wachowskis over his being written out of the movie. He even went as far as claiming he was being blackballed in the industry by the producers. Chong hasn't been in many movies since The Matrix — which may hint that he is difficult to work with.

Beyond all of this was a website I never heard of probably made by Chong and is a goldmine of sneed lmao

www.boycottthematrix.com

https://web.archive.org/web/20020608185811/http://www.boycottthematrix.com/index.htm

As a result of all this drama, Chong's last real feature film was in "The Crow: Wicked Prayer" starring washed up actors Edward Furlong (John Conner T2), Tara Reid (American Pie), and David Boreanaz (Buffy TV show)

(Despite being a fan of the original "The Crow" Brandon Lee movie, I have never even heard of this crow movie until now but I will give every dramatard 1 gold award who has suffered through it and educates me on how terrible it is)

Anyway I have no idea wtf this r-slur has been doing for 15 years after sperging out, but I found his youtube account were he paints a crazy picture and if you skip to the last few seconds claims The Whack-out-ski Sister threatened to transition him, to the grave.

Now that you have seen all the evidence

Please judge, who was right here: