All of our trains in Lebanon have been ripped out in the 60s and 70s so we can siphon our money more efficiently to the patron class by buying cars and gas through their companies. Granted cars make sense for the topography but trains should have stayed in operation, especially for freight.

Not sure how recent some of these data points are, unless it just describes the law for some of these if less data is available

I have written a few comments about day to day life in Lebanon as we’re being bombed and now invaded by an indiscriminate killing machine. This war has more surreal than anything I’ve lived through: more surreal than the post-blast week, more surreal than peak lockdown season, more surreal than any of the waves of civil conflict throughout my life. I have never felt more guilty for every breath of air I take and every hug I give my family. People, normal civilian people like me, are losing everything, often their lives.

More surreal: an Arabic sweet shop I go to very often (it’s on a main highway) got damaged by an attack this week. It’s in the middle of a very safe city. Like imagine your favorite something just had to close from war damage. Good thing the indiscriminate killing machine didn’t suspect that terrorists were hiding in the baklawa. Maybe next week they’ll find them and finish the job.

Would you fucking believe it if I told you I get DMs from people “sympathizing with my hardships” but asking me if I could kindly remove my post because of some US election shenanigans.

Some people will just never understand that there is a whole world outside the Global North full of complex people and situations. I like not being bombed for the crime of not being a European colonist. But writing about it in English online? Must be a psyop huh. At least this isn’t Reddit where a few years back someone actually questioned whether I could really be Lebanese if I was writing so much in decent English. Truly le euphoric intellectual site.

And hey if I was an American voter I’d probably still cast an unenthusiastic ballot for the cop if I was in a battleground state. I get it, I hate the other guy, it would be morally gray, but no grayer than the options we get to vote for here. But that doesn’t mean this absurd defense of the indiscriminate killing machine, spewing forth from every corner of the woodwork, hasn’t really highlighted how the US just has two right wing parties. You guys (Americans) should be reframing the Vietnam protests as a cute little Sunday picnic compared to what you should be doing now. Which they were.

You have to hold these ghouls accountable and the “nice democratic countries’” fetish for pretend civility has never been more exhausting. You think in the annals of history they’re going to say “good thing they didn’t whip out the nooses, that would have been so beneath our perfect empire”? Of course not. It would just be correctly understood as appeasement. When the indiscriminate killing machine is properly listed next to Rhodesia and Nazi Germany, the fervent support the world showed them will be a rightful, eternal humiliation for every country that has been rewarding them for tearing our families and limbs apart.

Or hey, maybe we get wiped off the map and get all our towns renamed to someone else’s language. And we are removed from the history books. Clearly our lives are just acceptable collateral for people playing what should ostensibly be a very important political game. If that’s what our lives are worth, what is our memory worth?

Relevant, from a comment I wrote below that is buried under too many other comments:

If going to jail is the penalty for not joining the IDF, it is the moral thing to do and should be worn like a badge of honor. It’s not complicated at all unless you literally have a death penalty for not joining. I don’t care how controversial this is: if as an IDF terrorist you don’t commit a mutiny, desert, or off yourself, congratulations, you’ve net increased the evil in the world.

Sympathizing with the IDF is 1:1 the exact same as sympathizing with the SS and anyone who says otherwise has both fingers in their ears and yelling nanananana until the crunching noises under their bulldozers stop.

You cannot be systematically eradicating a people you consider inferior and also pretend you have any moral high ground. You cannot bomb hospitals and ambulances and homes and schools and pretend like you are the good guy. You cannot set up viewing platforms to have your kids watch the destruction with your own eyes and claim to be the good guy.

Not to make this about me but I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets. I know damn well that if I lost my own home these shelters are full and I would have literally nowhere to go. And more people are losing their homes every hour. People are fleeing to Syria and Iraq for safety, even as the border crossings are getting hit as well.

This is beyond ”normal” human evil. If any other army was doing this we would have rows of criminals hanging from cranes in The Hague, instead we have to watch them smugly tell us we’re next in a speech from the UN. For the unforgivable crime of being born on land that apparently exists only for colonization.

Do not let anyone lie to you. A Holocaust is happening right now and it is exactly as evil as the one the Nazis committed.

The port blast was divine mercy compared to this waking nightmare. It was a sign of immense incompetence and the culmination of decades of neglectful systems failing to do the bare minimum and we got months of genuine solidarity among everyone in the months afterward. People, even if it was mostly naive and performative among some communities, found purpose in moving forward from a crime together.

Now it’s an apocalypse. So much of the city is gone. Tens of thousands of totally normal people have been robbed of their homes and possessions, and hundreds of thousands don’t know if their homes are next. This is ignoring all the deaths. Most people affected were already pretty poor. It’s so fucked. I live in a safe area and can no longer function as a human being. The bombing has been less and less muffled lately. I don’t know if I’m within a month or week or rounding error of losing my home, and this being a safe area, I have nowhere to flee to. I live where people flee to. This is the destination. I’m not rich enough to have foreign passport or a visa that will let me fly out and stay somewhere else.

I literally wake up, read a list of places and number of casualties, and throw up before my day even begins. I’m shaking 24 hours and sleeping maybe 4 per night. This morning the footage is many residential buildings crumbling with hoarse voices desperately thanking God for the missile not hitting them / screaming for God to not make them the next victims (in case you were wondering why you hear Allahu Akbar by bystanders in war videos. That’s what that ”oh my God” equivalent means in that context. Imagine hearing them in your own dialect... Yeah real comforting)

Consider this: my favorite confectionary shop, bang in the middle of a safe area with zero militant activity (or support!), got damaged in a series of strikes yesterday. Because the wrong person (allegedly a cash mule, the horror) was driving past it. If the point was only to hit paramilitary things, we wouldn’t be here.

The cruelty, as ever, is the point. We are being Lebensraumed while the world either watches in horror or claps fervently. But no real will to stop the crimes

Lebanon has been spiraling for some time, but I wouldn't say it's a dystopia. Or a utopia, of course. But it's genuine. People don't kick their kids out on the street at 18 like they apparently do in the US, kids don't get shot in school either. People don't get stabbed or mugged, sometimes harassed by beggars but there's usually not violent crime. More positively, there's a lot to do that isn't centered around making you pay for experiences. I feel like that might not be the case everywhere. At least when we're not being terrorized, Lebanon is... very chill. Chill with a side of feudalism, but that's not today's topic.

Most of us pull together, we have relatively tough social bonds from years of facing difficulties together. On paper everything is fucked: currency is worthless, terrible infrastructure, literal terrorist state looking to Lebensraum us with impunity, mob-run essential services. But I don't know how to leave this behind. I know how to live on 8 hours of electricity per day, I know how to ration bathing water and fuel. I don't know how to deal with the more complex shit I see people dealing with elsewhere online.

Like a ton of people move to Canada. Sure, I speak both English and French decently well. But isn't a house anywhere worth living prohibitively expensive? Our Canadian-Palestinian friends have been discriminated against for the past twenty years, am I going to have to live as a second class citizen? etc etc. Sure as a Lebanese Christian I think I'd get a pass where others won't, but I don't want a pass, I want a safe place to home. All I write here is from a place of relative privilege though. I don't deal with extra shit for being poor or from a religion whose followers tend to be poor, I'm not LGBT, I don't come from a border town, I wasn't born into a town or family that has tribalish skirmishes. It's easy for me to sit and wonder about immigration at my leisure.

There's also analysis paralysis, right. I can theoretically move to many countries. In practice, every place has pros and cons, and it looks like the cons keep piling up pretty much everywhere while the pros drop one by one. Although that applies to Lebanon as well. If I'm going to be struggling, where better to struggle than among friends and family, in the land I call home?

It’s 9 am now and they’re still bombing. An entire section of the city has been turned into ashes and a lot of people were just sleeping on the sides of the road in safer areas this morning. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this in my lifetime.

I’ve been to some of these neighborhoods. They are very poor, the people there have been neglected by the authorities for generations, leading many of them to believe strongly in the alternative. I don’t see that as wrong.

I feel guilty for even having a fraction of opportunity more than these people, to just live in an area that people go to for safety. To be able to worry about infrastructure and the international response and not my life and the loss of loved ones and their lack of a proper burial.

At least I’m not one of the clowns defending this on Lemmy. I didn’t think our little network was worth the disinfo effort but here we are. I’m on this platform to get away from this shit.

This graphic is a year old! It’s actually seventeen years since that blockade now.

I wonder why some people there might think violence is the only thing their enemy would understand. Really a mystery.

For good measure, in Arabic, Niemcy (actually “Namsa”) is what we call Austria. Germany is “Almania”, same as in French.

Of course, we have as many curveballs as you could want for European place names. Like Venice. Somehow we ended up with “Al Bunduqiya” for Venice. Have fun with that one.

This post reminded me of a post I vaguely remember, in the far recesses of my mind. Did I save it?

Finally, local OCR in our phones letting us quickly dig through the archives for moldy unfunny memes from 2018. The future is now.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a Mac user but I’ve seen how fast these newer MacBooks edit video on battery power without breaking a sweat (and without eating through the battery).

People focus on “software magic” with Apple but the M chips are serious hardware that a lot of us don’t take seriously because the company that killed the iPod made them.

It’s also funny because It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is still airing too, and that is massively more edgy than anything seinfeld ever did.

And that’s always been my argument when it comes to this particular dead horse. I don’t think any jokes are off the table, you just really have to make whatever discomfort you’re summoning be worth the punchline. The edgier something is the more it has to be funny to compensate, the point of offensive humor is to be funny not to offend, right? This has to be common sense. I don’t get how it flies over the head of so many people.