Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Some items I'm tracking this week:
Austria didn't pay for Russian gas, as a remedy for an arbitration award. This ends Austria's 50 year dependence on Russian gas, mid-winter.
Anti-NATO nationalist won the first round of Romanian presidential election. Calin Georgescu, who has praised Putin's regime and blamed the military-industrial complex for the war in Ukraine, secured over 22.9% of the vote, surpassing pro-western candidates Lasconi and Ciolacu.
Israel <> Hezbollah ceasefire
As a case study for negative impacts of technology, apparently the introduction of Facebook groups allowed larger-scale cooperation in Myanmar to a much larger extant than before, and contributed/enabled/made possible the Rohinya genocide.
Aljazeera looked at whether aid workers are being tagetted, given that relatively many (281 in 2024) were killed this year, articularly in Gaza. This could be important, because killing aid workers potentially makes catastrophes much worse.
Further protests in Pakistan about releasing Imran Khan
His wives kept dying mysteriously. His secret poison: Insulin
William Dale Archerd was a charming sociopath who married frequently, drank highballs, and despised 9-to-5 employment. He was a natural salesman who married seven women from 1930 to 1965, sometimes not bothering to divorce the previous one. Archerd was finally arrested in 1967 for a series of murders carried out using insulin injections to mimic fatal illnesses.
Israel and Lebanon instituted a ceasefire, which was then broken. However, Lebanese are returning to their abandoned homes
Per Biden's announcement of the ceasefire, it is between the governments of Lebanon and Israel, and their respective security forces. It doesn't seem to bind Hezbollah?. Over the next 60 days, the Lebanese Army and the State Security Forces will deploy and take control of their own territory once again. Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure in southern Lebanon will not be allowed to be rebuilt.
Food conditions continue to worsen in Gaza, in part because Israel has been blocking aid
The US and Japan are High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) on Japan's Nansei islands to defend Taiwan in case of a Chinese invasion, as reported by Voice of America.
Trump team weighs direct talks with Kim Jong Un. Meanwhile, in his final meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this month in Peru, Biden asked for Beijing to use its leverage to reel in North Korea.
Documents declassified by the US reveal a list of assassination targets authorized/ordered by Putin
North Korea reveals uranium enrichment facility for the first time. DHL cargo plane crashed just outside the Vilnius airport, killing the Spanish pilot and injuring the three other crew members. Lithuania cannot rule out terrorism.
If Trump introduces tariffs against other nations, inflation in the US would go up, and other countries would likely retaliate.
Bird flu found in sample of California raw unpasteurized milk sold to the public. group of access leaked api access keys to OpenAI's Sora model in protest to considering themselves "free PR"
I'm surprised you didn't raise the Russian-captained Chinese-flagged ship that dragged it's anchor for 100 miles in the Baltic Sea, cutting the Baltic Sea undersea cable between German and Finland and Sweden and Lithuania.
The ship is currently surrounded by NATO vessels, with various European countries raising the rather pertinant point of sabotage. For which there a number of interesting things to say- this is neither the first case of probable Russian sabotage in Europe in recent years, but the timing and the nature are interesting in the context of the recent Ukraine posturing- but it's also interesting on the question of Chinese involvement, if any.
Especially given the Russian ruble tumble, which appears to be a foreign exchange issue given that they banned foreign currency purchases for the rest of the year, which itself followed a systemic Chinese premium charge of Rubles-for-Yuan from this summer
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This isn't really news, I remember Facebook being blamed for enabling the Rohingya genocide several years ago.
Sure. It was news to me though.
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Wouldn't any communication platform work the same way? I mean, you can coordinate on Twitter or good old webforum or even call-in BBS for that matter (yes, I am old enough to have used one). What's so special in Facebook? Yes, maybe this particular group used Facebook. But they could have used any other means with the same result.
Any communication platform that's already widely used, has easy to find groups, allows groups of massive size and keeps those groups mostly out of the sight of unwanted people. The list of suitable platforms isn't huge once you account for those.
Aren't those two contradictory? If it's easy to find (and, I assume, participate, otherwise what's the point in finding them?) then "unwanted people" could easily pretend to be wanted people and find and participate too?
For the rest of it I don't see any limiting factors. Web forum can do any of these and more very easily, and I've been using web forums over 2 decades ago.
Not at all. It's enough that the contents of the group not be shown to people who aren't members even if the name of the group is obvious to people who are aware of the terminology / slang.
This is unlikely to work in English but can work much better in other languages when the censor-happy employees (usually not speakers of said language) don't even know what to look for (and having the group be "closed" prevents them from accidentally seeing the messages that use more straightforward language / imagery).
The thing about web forums is that nobody uses those outside nerds / people with some specialty interest while, well, pretty much everyone is on social media. This makes it super easy to both join such group as well as recommend it to people you know (and thus gather critical mass).
Yes, about all forum software I know about supports this option. Private mailing lists of course predate this by another couple of decades.
In fact, Facebook is about the worst platform for this - if you want to coordinate a genocide, on FB it's enough to have one snitch in the group who would alert the moderators and your group is gone. If you do it on a forum, and the admins of the forum either friendly to your cause or neutral, you'd have to resort to heavy artillery like pressuring their provider or cloudflare or similar providers and you'd have to have much more proof, and likely by the time you pull it off their deed will be done. And even if you succeed they'd just find a more sympathetic provider - see the story of kiwifarms, for example.
That may be true today, because FB is easier, but before FB existed a ton of non-nerd people used forums. If FB becomes less convenient, they can move back. Using forums is not hard at all, it's just a bit less convenient, but if you're planning a secret genocide, you can tolerate a little inconvenience as a price of not being discovered and executed, I think.
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What's so special about facebook is that it was the first to offer this at scale in that country, in a way accessible to wide swathes of the population.
That country didn't have access to the web before? Because web forums have been offering that - basically at any scale a country with population less than the US, making 100M+ member forum probably would require some work - since forever.
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The real reason is Facebook was being blamed by democrats for the 2016 election loss, so they stuck them with every accusation they could find.
I don't think it's about 2016 specifically or only. Any valuable resource that is not under the control of The Party must be either brought under control or destroyed. It doesn't matter if it's being used by The Enemy currently or not, and what for - anything that is not under control is a threat, and must be dealt with. That of course is true for Facebook too. One of the basic tenets of socialism is centralized control (for the good of the masses, of course!) and in modern informational society, obviously, this means control over the flows of information.
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I don't know why Facebook specifically; maybe it was the zero-rate-with-app-garden thing they were also doing in India around the same time.
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