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.

I think we should commit genocide on Russia and China and Iran and North Korea with nuclear weapons.

I don't want regime change, I just don't want their government and citizens to be alive at all

!burgers

Pro-Palestine protestors gathered outside the Hollywood premiere of “Captain America: Brave New World” and called for a boycott of the film over its inclusion of the Israeli superhero Ruth Bat-Seraph, aka Sabra.https://t.co/TRNhD7Lkhb

— Variety (@Variety) February 12, 2025

Look up “Sabra and Shatila Incident”

— JohnKhalidi (@JohnKhalidi) February 12, 2025

There's a hundred versions of this attack in the replies as per usual every time this subject comes up. Let's unpack.

What the name actually refers to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_(person)#:~:text=A%20prickly%20pear%20cactus%2C%20which,a%20sweet%20and%20soft%20interior.

The Sabra character predates the Lebanese Christian militia chimpout:

So much for that nonsense

I can't believe I just defended Disney, kill me now

Why is Sweden so r-slurred?

What makes afghan refugees so important that they won't get deported no matter what crimes they commit, but a Ukrainian nursing student who's been in Sweden for a decade and is perfectly integrated has to go back home in the middle of a war lmao

https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/s/twZojbLKcj

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:

The boys love being under the sheets where it's warm

!animalposters !cats

🚨#BREAKING: The Truth

The past few days have been an unrelenting nightmare, marked by an overwhelming barrage of stress, frustration, and exhaustion that has taken a significant toll on my part. A severe and unjust breach of my personal life has occurred, and private… pic.twitter.com/bUa1OGxcnA

— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) February 19, 2025

"Furthermore, let me state this as clearly as possible as I have no interest in minors. Period." https://t.co/p3frIhg4uw pic.twitter.com/ydimrHv8ce

— MavLostHisIQ (@MavLostHisIQ) February 19, 2025

Respectfully, if you’re a proud gay man, why did you pretend to have a wife? https://t.co/Cv4uokZGI2 pic.twitter.com/bEKdDMepbm

— TheDoog (@doogle990) February 19, 2025

Who had this on their 2025 bingo card? https://t.co/CoONU1LOEE pic.twitter.com/J84ptCNbGq

— Garbage Human (@GarbageHuman24) February 19, 2025

So... turns out this degenerate is into pup play...

... dude... you can get off this dimension!

🫤 https://t.co/fOLLZe6u2m pic.twitter.com/B8MwnrnGQI

— Joshua Ek (@JoshuaEkOnX) February 19, 2025

Rawsalerts is ALSO into nappies and shit like that!

In an advanced and respectful society, you'd be put down like the sick dog you identify as!

What a degenerate!

🫤 pic.twitter.com/ArrEtlydqu

— Joshua Ek (@JoshuaEkOnX) February 19, 2025

"Imporntant" bro gooning as he wrote this whole statement https://t.co/ng4L3A6GUt

— Cynic (@FreeRoamMode) February 19, 2025

Now THATS how you conservatism in 2025. Uwu

!friendsofspiderman

There's a lot here, but a summary and some key takeaways:

Lady is a feminist and a dominatrix. Decides she wants to fight for social justice in a small South African kingdom. Applies to the Peacecorps; is told that up to half of all Peacecorps volunteers ragequit, and is she absolutely certain she wants to continue fighting for social justice? Says yes, gets in the program, is informed on arrival that there will be no fighting for social justice, since Africans are racist and sexist and the local King will absolutely FAFO the Peacecorps if it fricks around.

Whole country is full of AIDS. 25% of all people have HIV, including 40% (yes) of all pregnant women.

Lots of little details come to light, such as:

A man killed his wife for asking him to wear a condom. Whether this is a reasonable thing to do or not is, evidently, a matter of national debate in their society.

Peacecorps volunteers can't wear anything too slutty, like mom jeans, else they might get r*ped. Having to wear a dress and not being allowed to wear jeans causes her fellow volunteers so much distress that at least one of her coworkers quits.

Libertarianism is rampant. To the point where they have billboards everywhere warning adults that fricking kids will give them AIDS.

It's not just normies, either. Apparently the King himself spotted a middleschooler he wanted to bang; her family tried to flee to England, so he had the Secret Service track her down and abduct her.

Because Africans hate hookers, Peacecorps volunteers find themselves needing to do HIV outreach work while simultaneously avoiding groups with HIV, lest they anger the locals too much.

The Peacecorps offers months of training and ideological reinforcement, but after that, has no idea what the frick it's doing. Every individual volunteer is, evidently, expected to think of something useful to do on their own, if and when they get assigned to a village; there's no "plan". Just liberal 20-somethings, abandoned amongst AIDS-riddled libertarian male feminists, with truckfulls of cash and rapidly souring views on the nobility of underprivileged Africa.

Eventually Our Heroine finds a village where hookers have formed a union, of a sorts, and is like OOO GOODY as a hooker myself, that's for me.

Unfortunately, it turns out most of the hookers aren't actually hookers. They're fake hookers, only telling the NGOs that they work as hookers because they expect government gibs earmarked for s*x workers. There is, apparently, no way of screening any of them, so everyone loots the hooker aid money and nobody cares.

But whatever, some of them are probably hookers right?

The local NGOees hit on a brilliant plan to convert the "hookers" into car wash attendants - even though there's almost no cars, and the only "road" in the community is a mud track that makes cleaning an effort in futility.

But the car wash is abandoned halfway through the building process, after the money is handed out but before anything concrete and workable is in place. Instead of waiting to finish the wash (which would have been an economic failure anyways, given the aforementioned lack of roads), the Peacecorp Kids organize a press event and take a bunch of photos to go on their resumes, before every single one of them leaves.

The half-finished car wash is abandoned and the Africans go back to hooking. Only lasting legacy are the news reports touting the success of those bright-eyed white liberals helping African hookers get on their feet.

The fact that she, also, fricked off out of Africa and cynically hates her Peacecorps work, same as the rest of the buttholes she worked with, goes unremarked.

OH, and frick Trump and Elon, they're the real problem, even though aid doesn't work it's important we support it anyway. Maybe she'll explain this in a subsequent article...?

The dude who tried to crash Kendrick Lamar‘s Super Bowl set by running out on the field with the Palestinian and Sudan flag, was a Sudanese tether

😐#NonFBAnonsense pic.twitter.com/x4iIin13pj

— Tariq Nasheed 🇺🇸 (@tariqnasheed) February 10, 2025

People know they hate to see a real FBA win

Imagine being 43 years old and being this cringe

He's from the Congo but cares more about Palestine... curious

True American FBA patriots are lighting up ICE's phones over this

Orange Site thread

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

SNL had Tom Hanks play a racist Trump supporter who wouldn’t shake a Black man’s hand. This propaganda is dumb and isn’t funny.

When will they learn?? pic.twitter.com/b5s5culphF

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 17, 2025

For those of you not in the know, Black Jeopardy is a recurring SNL sketch in which the trivia categories are replaced with Black slang,. Naturally, many of the jokes use Black stereotypes as the punchline, so you'd think rightoids would love this. Sadly, the chuds of the moment are too thin-skinned to appreciate this.

8 years ago, Tom Hanks joined Black Jeopardy as Doug, a Trump supporter (hick) who fits into the show perfectly due to a shared distrust of elites, but is reluctant to shake the host's hand.

Recently, as part of the 50th Anniversary, SNL did another Black Jeopardy. It was the least funny one so far, but that's not important. At the end, Doug appears and does the same thing as before (getting a question right, is reluctant to shake the host's hand).

Rightoids were not having this, proclaiming and finding common ground to be instead to mockery of all rightoids, and an expression of the liberal elite's pure contempt for them.

You can see some here: https://x.com/search?q=libs+of+tiktok+tom+hanks, but here's a few others:

Add another chapter to the book “Why We May Never Lose Again.” Unbelievably offensive. They’ve learned nothing. https://t.co/7Geqszjafc

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) February 17, 2025

POS snob who thinks he's better than us. https://t.co/ECY4dXgDjQ

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) February 17, 2025

And here's Elon retweeting the time-honored tradition of "all my enemies are libertarians":

Brock is so cute! Triana is the sleepiest babe!

!animalposters !cats

their new tactic is to dive bomb fricking planes? ground all flights. Fire every fricking airline employee. Hang the fricking commies.

Mexicans, Canadians, nor s should be allowed to pilot airplanes in U.S. airspace from now on.

At least until every foreigner is psychoanalysed.

Ive seen like 50 different videos from doorbells, webcams, dashcams, and phones all released within 2 hours of this crash.

Yet the DC collision we only have 2 grainy videos from far away?

Especially having footage from 40 different angles released immediately.

I've been saying that there's a possibility that the CRJ700 that crashed in D.C. was headed towards the White House and that the Air Force/USSS used maybe a missile or remote controlled helicopter to take it out.

How do you cover up an attack like that?

You call it a helicopter "accident",

'cause you can never say you blew up a passenger plane carrying 60 or so people in it.

This looks like a fricking missile

@Aevann rightoid drama

And by 'destroy' I mean 'cause a nationwide blackout' and by 'monkey' I mean 'monkey'.