Pagers Explode Across Lebanon | Israel commences military strikes in Lebanon

Mossad loves to move preemptively so it wouldn't surprise me if they had intel of Hezbollah moving a specific plan into action, this "pager move" may have been intended to derail whatever it was they saw as imminent.

An alternative theory would be that someone had worked out their pager was tampered with so Israel quickly hit the green light before the warning could get out? i.e the timing wasn't ideal but they didn't want to waste the opportunity.

www.twz.com

Hezbollah's Exploding Pagers Could Be As Monumental A Cyber-Espionage Operation As Stuxnet

We live surrounded by networked devices equipped with packs full of potential energy, possibly offering adversaries an unprecedented vector for kinetic attacks.
www.twz.com www.twz.com
 
Batt Boy said:
Mossad loves to move preemptively so it wouldn't surprise me if they had intel of Hezbollah moving a specific plan into action, this "pager move" may have been intended to derail whatever it was they saw as imminent.

An alternative theory would be that someone had worked out their pager was tampered with so Israel quickly hit the green light before the warning could get out? i.e the timing wasn't ideal but they didn't want to waste the opportunity.

www.twz.com

Hezbollah's Exploding Pagers Could Be As Monumental A Cyber-Espionage Operation As Stuxnet

We live surrounded by networked devices equipped with packs full of potential energy, possibly offering adversaries an unprecedented vector for kinetic attacks.
www.twz.com www.twz.com
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Sounds like something the aliens in 3 Body Problem would do.
 
CarolinaFever said:
I don't have any problem with Israel doing this to terrorists. I still have a problem with them killing innocent Palestinians in the war, and cutting off aid to them. Both sides have done some horrible things.
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It wasn't just terrorists. And logically, you know there's going to be some collateral damage. They affected about 2,500 devices according to Hezbollah. No guarantee that all of those were in a terrorist pocket at the time even with Israel 's incredibly loose definition of terrorists.
 
superrific said:
Well, first, happening in another country really is kind of a big deal, unless we want to be fighting everyone all at once.

Second, if you were looking that soldier in the face, wouldn't it be better to tell him that he's being shipped home because we're not fighting this stupid war any more? It's one thing to inflict casualties in a war of necessity like WWII. It's another thing to pick fights around the world, decide that these fights require a massive war effort involving hundreds of thousands of Americans, and then claim that bombing other countries is fine because we're trying to win a war. How about: if we can't win a war without committing gross human rights violations, maybe we shouldn't be fighting the war unless utterly necessary.
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That is fine but imagine a similar scenario happened in a war that was more clearly justified. At some point you tell Laos and Cambodia that they either stop the flow of combatants and weapons through their country or you will. I think that that is a fair policy.
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
That is fine but imagine a similar scenario happened in a war that was more clearly justified. At some point you tell Laos and Cambodia that they either stop the flow of combatants and weapons through their country or you will. I think that that is a fair policy.
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If the war was more clearly justified, then it's likely that Laos and/or Cambodia would either be an enemy or an ally. The Vietnam War was fundamentally an act of aggression by the U.S. We were projecting our power into Asia. Thus, we weren't likely to get support from the other countries in the area, who would have preferred we just leave. And it's not right to expect neighboring countries who have no interest in our aggression to do our bidding or risk getting bombed.

It would be like Putin telling Romania to stop the flow of arms to Ukraine and if they don't, he will bomb them. If you're in Romania, you'd be thinking WTF.

By contrast, we had no such trouble in WWII. The reason, of course, that WWII was justified is that our allies were literally getting attacked by an imperialist regime. Those two realities go hand in hand. There weren't Laoses or Cambodias (there is Switzerland but for reasons we know well, they didn't and couldn't play the role of arms conduit).
 
www.nytimes.com

Pager Attack on Hezbollah Kills 12, Putting Israel and Lebanon on Edge: Live Updates

The Lebanese armed group blamed Israel for blowing up pagers, killing 12 and injuring thousands. The Taiwanese company some officials named as the manufacturer sought to distance itself from the devices.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

Another wave of explosions was reported Wednesday afternoon in Lebanon, a day after at least 12 people were killed and thousands more injured in Lebanon in an apparently coordinated attack that targeted members of the group by blowing up their pagers.

Al-Manar, Hezbollah’s official broadcaster, reported wireless devices had exploded in multiple locations in Lebanon.

“There are buildings burning right now in front of me,” Mortada Smaoui, 30, a resident of Beirut’s southern suburbs, said after a series of simultaneous explosions hit his neighborhood. He said that firefighters and soldiers were rushing to the scene.

The chief medical officer at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, Salah Zeineddine, said that Lebanese authorities had put the hospital’s staff on standby following reports of a new round of explosions.

...

  • A child’s funeral: Mourners gathered in the village of Saraain for the funeral of the youngest confirmed victim of the pager attack: 9-year-old Fatima Abdullah. They chanted as they made their way through cemetery: “They killed our child Fatima!”
...

Hezbollah said that more explosions had occurred in different areas of Lebanon on Wednesday, this time affecting handheld radios.
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
That is fine but imagine a similar scenario happened in a war that was more clearly justified. At some point you tell Laos and Cambodia that they either stop the flow of combatants and weapons through their country or you will. I think that that is a fair policy.
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Neither Laos nor Cambodia had the military power to stop North Vietnam from using parts of their territory to move troops, weapons, ammunition, supplies, etc. and for bases of operation.

Laos itself had an insurgency - the Laos People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP). By 1975, the LPRP had overturned the Royal Lao Government.

In Cambodia, the Cambodian Government was also fighting off an insurgency.
 
Imagine what they could do to an electric (or gas powered) car given that most are connected to the internet via cellular networks these days.

Edit to add: how about a separate thread to rehash a 50 year old war?
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
That is fine but imagine a similar scenario happened in a war that was more clearly justified. At some point you tell Laos and Cambodia that they either stop the flow of combatants and weapons through their country or you will. I think that that is a fair policy.
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Laos and Cambodia had zero power to do that None I imagine
 
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And now apparently around 200 "walkie-talkies" have blown up. Combine these two incidents with the thousands of rockets Hezbollah has accumulated in Southern Lebanon. If I were in Hezbollah, then I would want to be behind something very solid before I tried launching one of those rockets at Isreal.
 
The sad thing is that at the very beginning, the Babylon Bee was actually pretty funny (albeit a bit uneven).

It largely poked fun at evangelical subculture and religious satire, not political, was the main point.

But then I think they went viral with some anti-Dem posts/stories and began to lean into that which then brought them more attention (and money) and then they pretty much went all the way in that direction.

It's sad, because the very early incarnation of the site (and its social media) was actually pretty often a fairly funny take on evangelicalism and did a pretty good job poking at the issues within evangelicalism.
 
SnoopRob said:
The sad thing is that at the very beginning, the Babylon Bee was actually pretty funny (albeit a bit uneven).

It largely poked fun at evangelical subculture and religious satire, not political, was the main point.

But then I think they went viral with some anti-Dem posts/stories and began to lean into that which then brought them more attention (and money) and then they pretty much went all the way in that direction.

It's sad, because the very early incarnation of the site (and its social media) was actually pretty often a fairly funny take on evangelicalism and did a pretty good job poking at the issues within evangelicalism.
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Agree.

Problem arises when you lose the ability to make honest fun of yourself and instead focus all your energy on creating in/out groups. Subsequently, you create a "punching down" dynamic that steadily devolves into bigotry. This effect maintains a comic value for only so long for the reason Cody Johnston articulates in the video - there're only 1 or 2 jokes and eventually many folks consciously or subconsciously become worn-out by the constant underlying anger and resentment. I wonder if the soft and overt bigotry of right-wing "comedy" still hits as hard in Springfield, OH.
 
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