I’m not sure that the headline is saying that it’s not normal to be freaked out – just that people are freaked out.

Yep!

Both sides taking the off-ramp, returning to the shadow war, and not attacking each other directly.

999 problems and federation is probably one

Weird. Why are the powers that be hiding 3 posts from you???

Whoa, this was my 1000th post. Huzzah! (or Sorry!)

At least for now, it looks like Iran is downplaying the attacks, which is a good sign for de-escalation.

Unprecedented? Maybe? But unexpected? You’d have to have been deluded to think Iran was just going to take it.

You’ve sort of set that up as either that reaction or no reaction. Everyone expected a reaction. Iran and Israel have been at this a long time. Israel expected a reaction similar to their past actions. And they’ve always avoided direct confrontation. I don’t think I saw anyone predicting that response from Iran before it happened.

No it definitely was. The first attack from Iran from a few months back was done pretty politely.

I’m just skeptical of that. I think their second attack was similar to the first but with less lead time and better weaponry – an amped up version of their initial message which was basically, “don’t fuck with us.”

The main reason I’m skeptical is that I don’t think Iran wants war right now. They had even initially said that Hezbollah was going to responsible for the response. That led to internal debate that was won by more hard line voices. But this really couldn’t be a worse time for war for Iran. They’re probably weaker right now than they’ve ever been. Their economy is terrible and the public hates the government. Their unpopularity led to civil unrest that they violently suppressed, which restored order but increased public dislike of the government. The domestic picture is not rosy right now.

On top of that, their game plan in conflict is to be backed up by their proxies, primarily Hezbollah. That plan is in tatters now. Hamas has probably lost about 75% of their fighters. They’re in no position to be a major threat at the moment. Hezbollah has been weakened and is relatively disorganized compared to a few months ago. They had near absolute trust in Nasrallah and they probably can’t be certain that whoever replaces him will share his level of commitment. The Houthis are further away and are the least reliable of the three. Finally, Iran doesn’t have to lose to lose. Any diminishment of Iran is a relative strengthening of Saudi Arabia that shifts the balance of power in the region.

All of that taken together leads me to think their intention was to put an exclamation mark on their previous message and not dare Israel to go to war with them.

Iran’s response was literally unprecedented. No one could have reasonably expected them to react that way based on their past behaviour.

The point though, is that Israel miscalculated. They saw that attack as similar to past actions they’d taken. They didn’t see it as an escalation and, most importantly, they didn’t think Iran would see it that way. They were extremely wrong. Similarly, though based on much less information, I suspect that Iran’s most recent attack wasn’t intended as a massive escalation but as coming right up to the line without crossing it. More saying “we are deadly fucking serious.” It wasn’t taken that way.

The larger point is that two sides that don’t talk to each other making estimates of reactions to violent responses is dangerous as fuck.

Wiki:

The Maeil Business Newspaper (Korean: 매일경제신문), also simply known as Maekyung (derived from the pronunciation of the Korean name) or MK, is a comprehensive daily newspaper published in South Korea, first issued on March 24, 1966. The president of the publishing company is Chang Dae-whan.

. . .

Maeil Business Newspapers are generally moderate media, but many say they are close to pro-business conservatism.

According to coverage from ABC, there weren’t any:

Mexican army troops have killed 19 suspected drug cartel gunmen in a shootout and suffered no casualties, the Defense Department said.

It’s complicated:

Threats against journalists and their sources have increased exponentially since the latest round of factional fighting broke out after two Sinaloa drug capos — one from each faction — flew to the United States and were arrested there.

. . .

Journalists have reported being stopped by gunmen on roadways outside Culiacan and told they couldn’t cover the continuing gunbattles happening on the outskirts of the city on an almost daily basis.

The fear is well founded; in 2022, one of El Debate’s columnists, Luis Enrique Ramírez, was abducted and killed in Culiacan. His beaten body was found wrapped in plastic on a dirt road outside the city.

Israel, the US, and probably others were looking for him but no one could find him. It was a chance encounter with trainee soldiers.

https://neuters.de/about

“This is an alternative frontend to Reuters. It is intented to be lightweight, fast and was heavily inspired by Nitter.”

I agree that we should just link to Reuters and include neuters in the post body, like most do with archive.today links.

Edit: I checked and it’s unchanged from the original. They don’t actually link to the original, which is super annoying, but you can get to it by replacing ‘neuters.de’ with ‘reuters.com.’

Reuters MBFC.

No, if there were serious, pervasive bias impacting scores, it would lower the correlation and MBFC would be an outlier in the group because they would be in agreement less. If something’s happening at such a low level that it doesn’t impact correlation, it’s just an outlier. Multiple researchers conclude that the differences between monitors is too low to impact downstream analysis which is hard to square with your claim. And, each entry represents about 0.01% of their content, so what percentage of that data is being used to draw sweeping conclusions about the whole?

There is just high agreement about what constitutes high and low quality news sites. The notion that MBFC is somehow inferior to other bias monitors or extremely biased is not supported by evidence. If one of those organizations is better than the others, it isn’t much better. As this study concludes, because the level of agreement between them is so high, it doesn’t really matter which one you use. They’re all fine. Even they think so. Not only do MBFC ratings correlate nearly perfectly with Newsguard, Newsguard’s rating of MBFC is a perfect score. They’re well-respected by each other.

And, really, how could these researchers who’ve dedicated their lives to understanding this stuff have gotten it so wrong? Academia definitely isn’t a hotbed of conservatism. Using awful tools could destroy their careers but MBFC is regularly used in research. Why? How are these studies getting through peer-review? How are they getting published? There are just too many failure points required.

From the JPost article:

Two articles published in the last few days were part of the IDF investigation, one from Jewish Chronicle and one from the German tabloid newspaper Bild. Both have claimed to reveal internal and top secret documents of Hamas, supposedly straight from Yahya Sinwar’s computer.

Not the NYT. Not sure how the Times gets painted with that brush for not publishing based on those documents. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I guess.

Your claim about the sexual violence article is also not true. The NYT spent a month re-reporting that story which didn’t result in a single correction. Their reporting is also supported by a UN investigation that concluded that there “are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October 2023.” I don’t think you can accuse the UN of collaborating with the IDF.

From this article:

The Times assessed the documents’ authenticity by sharing some of their contents with members of and experts close to Hamas. Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, a Hamas member and a former fighter in its military wing who is now an analyst based in Istanbul, said that he was familiar with some of the details described in the documents and that keeping organized notes was consistent with the group’s general practices. A Palestinian analyst with knowledge of Hamas’s inner workings, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive topics, also confirmed certain details as well as general structural operations of Hamas that aligned with the documents.

The Israeli military, in a separate internal report obtained by The Times, concluded the documents were real and represented another failure by intelligence officials to prevent the Oct. 7 attack. The Times also researched details mentioned in the meeting records to check that they corresponded with actual events.

You’re wrong. Tons of peer-reviewed research says you’re wrong. There just isn’t any that says you’re right.

Do you have an explanation for why this bias you claim is so pervasive cannot be found when anyone looks for it? Is it… paranormal bias? Is it just really shy bias that hides when it gets scared?

How can that be true and MBFC be in broad consensus across thousands of news sites with different tools from academics, journalists, and other bias monitoring organizations? Both things cannot be true. In fact, whenever someone compares MBFC to any other resource they find almost perfect correlation, not bias. I’d love for you to explain to me where that bias disappears to when under a microscope.

Is there a conspiracy between bias monitoring organizations, journalists, and academics you have evidence of? Are the prestigious journals that published them in on it too? I can’t wait to sketch out this vast global conspiracy to pull the wool over our eyes and convince us that Democracy Now is just… highly factual. Those bastards!

Aside from the extremely vocal minority who seek it out to downvote it and complain about it constantly, it does seem like people don’t care about it when they don’t need it and appreciate it when they do. Very unscientific observation but obscure sources usually seem to have more upvotes. It doesn’t need to be useful to everyone all the time to have value.

Having quick access to MBFC and Wiki links is great and useful for mods, I assume. I also like that it carves out a thread to discuss sources. Replying to the bot makes it seem much less like you’re attacking the OP, which I always hated pre-bot.

Solid rule. 9/10. One point deduction for making me look at Tom Cotton.