Image is of a Hezbollah missile attack on a military camp west of Jenin.
The situation between Hezbollah and Israel is rapidly escalating, with massive bombing campaigns on southern Lebanon by Israel predominantly on civilians (as the tunnels in South Lebanon are mostly unreachable to the Zionists, just like in Gaza), while Hezbollah and its allies respond with missile attacks predominantly on Israeli military facilities. Israel is spreading an evacuation order to the residents of southern Lebanese villages while also bombing their routes of escape and civilian infrastructure, similar to a terror tactic used widely in Gaza.
Northern Israel is currently under military censorship to hide their losses, so we get very little information other than what the Resistance provides and what videos and images get through the censors.
I don’t know if Israel will dare a ground incursion soon, but it seems fairly likely in the coming days or weeks.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Говорит Шестиугольный Медведь!Сообщение Совинформбюро!Hi!
I’m here to publish the list of proposals, made both by the mod team in internal discussions and from proposals made by users last week, to be voted on by the news heads.
The process will be quite simple. Below this comment will be a series of comments from me.
They will follow the format of…
<Proposal Comment>
If you agree with the proposal, upvote the comment with
YES VOTE. If you disagree with the proposal, upvote the comment with 
NO VOTE.
The voting margin to pass a proposal as approved shall be with a minimum floor of 36 upvotes, based on the rounded rough average of megathread upvotes of popular comments divided in half. Should a proposal be passed but prove to be controversial by also receiving a no vote of at least 26 votes, the proposal shall be tabled and reworked for presentation at a future megathread should the need arise.
Additionally, the floor will still be open to new proposals with a caveat that the minimum floor for acceptance for deliberation by the council of news mods shall be 31 upvotes. This is just in case someone is struck by the lightning of inspiration and wants to bring up an idea to shape the comm in a better direction.
The polls are now open.
Semper post, news hogs.
Edit: P.S, I know some of the proposals are kinda scuffed looking, if they pass I’ll format them so they look like the others on the rule sidebar. chalk it up to my laziness lol
Edit 2: P.P.S Pig poop balls.
The voting period shall last until the megathread is locked.
Proposal:
editing rule 4 on twitter links into:
--If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also any other Twitter mirror that doesn't require an account. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today , http://archive.org/ , or http://archive.ph/ . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed [1](https://xcancel.com/) [2](https://nitter.io.lol/) --so as to include more archive links
:geordi-yes
but I don’t think it’s very necessary as long as there’s a stable twitter mirror like xcancel.com.
Could just be replaced with a note on good ways to get around it
Honestly we should have a Twitter bot like the YouTube and Reddit ones
This proposal has tangential clauses.
I am against this as a requirement, but I have utmost respect for the posters who do it, and try to do it myself when I’m not out on a smoke break with like two minutes left. I’d prefer a paywall/accountwall link over no news. It is a sliding scale though. I probably will not view anything on instagram or facebook. The worse the platform, the more compelling the news must be to justify posting it.
100%. Anybody can whip up a fake tweet in two seconds. Tweets (posts in general on any platform) can be taken down, revised, corrected, or simply fake. Screenshot as a convenience is one thing, but it needs a source. It isn’t real unless I can send it
.
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A bloc proposal for megathread rules:
-- Comments inside the news megathread must obey all the above rules. ---- In addition, we strongly discourage comments that are off-topic and better suited to other places on Hexbear, and will remove them. Top-level comments - those that are replying directly to the megathread post, and not to another comment inside the megathread - should be kept related to current events or analysis of recent events, in order to keep the megathread easily readable and productive. Comments further down the chain can be as low-effort as you wish. ---- We will remove comments that merely seek to increase the comment count to achieve arbitrary goals (such as reaching 1000 comments and so on). We will also remove top-level comments about whether the general or trans megathreads have higher comment counts than the news megathread - it is not a competition. --Question: is sports news still considered news?
Yes.
I like your Lokomotiv posting. The news mega is great for Big Important News like wars and the economy but I also like to learn about other stuff, like sports or simply weird stuff. It is a nice palate cleanser in between all the horrible stuff.
That’s a good question
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I ask because I’d like to keep up the Lokomotiv/KHL posting but I don’t want to be clogging up the mega. If it is an issue I’d be willing to switch to a weekly update or move to another thread/com
Just my opinion: I don’t think sports are news. I don’t see a problem with how you have been doing it… but… I think if everyone started doing their sports posting in the news mega it would quickly get messy. Maybe switch over to the general mega?
If sports posting starts clogging the mega I will go into posting exile but until then I will continue to update everyone on Lokomotiv’s progress
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Proposal:
-- Sources for articles posted to C/News need to include the website it's from in the title. Example: "Boeing’s next big problem could be a strike by 32,000 workers" would become "CNN: Boeing’s next big problem could be a strike by 32,000 workers" --deleted by creator
Inspired by the source in title and time qualifier proposals. While placing a time qualifier on what constitutes current news is a too strong measure imho Id propose a softer form:
Proposal:
Encouragement to post the date of news in the title or comment body on the mega, especially if you know that what you post is not current (e.g. one month)Disclaimer: I’m mostly a lurker and am aware that this can be seen as a big ask
MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY?
now we’re really bikeshedding
DD MMMMM YYYY because my eyes aren’t a god damn file system.
26 September 2024 compared to 26/09/24 or 2024-09-26.
YYYY-MM-DD of course
Joking aside: I may be off, but I interpreted the rule proposal https://hexbear.net/comment/5426732 as a rule that if enforced, not current news get removed and voted no as a result. Sometimes you stumble upon articles that I haven’t seen discussed here but are somewhat dated yet still contain worthwhile information
Yeah, we did have some discussion in our top secret news mega mod chat about this topic. Myself in particular was worried about removing news about more obscure places where news about events can take a while to percolate out of, or news/analysis that initially seemed unimportant later became very important.
My impression has been that the proposed set of rules is more about codifying existing but unlisted rules, as well as some minor improvements. The news megathread has always been under more relaxed rules than the rest of the comm (e.g. if somebody like LargePenis starts talking about Iran in the 1980s, we aren’t going to be like “Erm, this breaks the rules and has to be removed, acktually”, whereas a post in the news comm about that same thing would probably get redirected to a different comm). And besides, those kinds of effortposts are almost always in relation to ongoing events and providing context. It’s basically never happened that somebody’s come here with a big essay on like, the War of the Roses or some old thing entirely unrelated to recent events, it’s just not an issue that we have to moderate. When somebody comes across a post that’s like 6 months old on idk, an understudied facet of events in Gaza, and then posts it here, it’s still very relevant analysis even if it isn’t news.
So we don’t anticipate having to be terribly more strict inside this megathread about “old news”. Things should not change much at all, in here at least.
You’re absolutely right I haven’t ever seen that things got removed for beeing to old. Somehow the rule just read very strict to me as ESL, but liked the idea of knowing the date of the information before I click, hence the proposal.
I really appreciate the quality, transparency and participatory aspect of moderation (and hexbear general) and love the culture here. The news mega (and hb) is the first thing I check in the morning
This is a good suggestion and should not be considered a joke at all. Most-to-least significant ordering is what everyone should use, always. And hyphens are already incorporated into most standards with that ordering (e.g. RFC 3339 and ISO 8601). (Fixed widths are also important to allow lexiographic sorting when there isn’t anything around to actually parse the dates into their separate fields, but that’s mostly an automation/computing thing.)
I know this isn’t an official proposal but
This is the best solution to the current vs past news question
Proposal:
The News Comm is a place of Revolutionary Optimism. We try to encourage participants to engage with news from around the world with pragmatism while discouraging doomerism.
To quote Antonio Gramsci:
“You must realize that I am far from feeling beaten…it seems to me that… a man out to be deeply convinced that the source of his own moral force is in himself — his very energy and will, the iron coherence of ends and means — that he never falls into those vulgar, banal moods, pessimism and optimism. My own state of mind synthesises these two feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Whatever the situation, I imagine the worst that could happen in order to summon up all my reserves and will power to overcome every obstacle.”
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Proposal:
Add Tamemoji function to the site.
I don’t know about the battling, but maybe something could be done about making emojis easier to find/search. Doing a fuzzy text search where 15 million emojis still show up in the search for a particular term does not seem to help much, as it might as well still be a scroll through 20 million very roughly ordered images. Some kind of sort by most frequently used/up-voted could actually be somewhat useful, as could making the search function a little more picky.
Proposal:
Please avoid low-effort initial comments on the megathread that consist only of idealistic wishings (example: If I were Iran I would simply start WWIII)
It is more desired for users to comment developed opinions and analysis in the megathread (example: Combat in Ukraine has shown that mass-produced drones has revolutionized warfare once again)
My comment where I “came up” with Genocide Joe would have been deleted under this proposal.
Damn mod stasi
I think we can do a little shitposting as secondary comments but not main comments. Main comments are for news, secondary comments are for reactions to said news.
after initially thinking that this seemed like a good idea, isn’t the point of a megathread to contain a bunch of people talking about one topic? if and when we experience “100 comment hours” or “1000 comment days”, we are all on the same page, and sharing/ commiserating/ celebrating/ insulting the current moment. i think encouraging substantive main comments is good, but we don’t need strict rules
I like suggesting this to users, but I’m going to vote “no” because I don’t understand why it is a RULE, and I think other users can simply remind folks that this clutters stuff up when it happens. If this is just a proposal for adding the recommendation to the sidebar and no such modification will be made if it fails, let me know and I can change to a “yes” vote. If it means mods will come along and leave a bunch of “this post was removed by a moderator” (or whatever) comments in the place of the other undesired litter it disallows, I see no point.
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Proposal for:
Placing a time limit qualifier on what separates current news from outdated news by one month.
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Non-binding meme proposal (Whether it passes or fails, it won’t become a rule, it’s mainly a joke to own egg1918 for being a cheeky little bugger):
egg1918 is the News Megathread’s one true poster, therefore the only poster allowed to post “first” on all new megathreads.
Friendly amendment from <REDACTED>: If the rule passes, egg1918 will be banned from the news comm and nobody except egg1918 will be allowed to post “first” on all new news megathreads
Fun fact this rule was actually voted down, but I included it anyways because Fuck the cops