You do realize those pagers were made in Taiwan right?
Just in case you hadn’t seen this follow-up:
And some info even suggests that this B.A.C. company was a shell company owned by Israel:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/israel-exploding-pagers-hezbollah.html
By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.
B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.
USA and it’s allies are just shoot themselves in the foot with this terror action.
https://x.com/zhao_dashuai/status/1836626658759184595
Posts from Chinese social media, stating factories are running overnight shifts to accommodate huge orders of communication devices from the Middle East.
A requirement from clients, is that the whole manufacturing process must be done inside China.
Yeah, you can’t do something this cartoonishly evil without it leaving a last impact on the reputation of both your country and it’s products.
Sounds like a lot more opportunities to put some spicy batteries in Mid East bound electronic shipments.
This is how the US will console itself after losing billions in sales because of their unhinged little sis.
Just to correct, the pagers were made by a taiwanese company, not chinese.
I think the meme is suggesting that they were literally made by “the West” but maybe I’m missing something
Taiwan is part of the capitalist core which is basically synonymous with the west. Honorary west you could say, at least until its strategic significance drops and it will get abandoned by USA.
I understand that argument, but to me that departs from normal parlance of the kind that would ever be used in a meme.
Think of it like more of a political term than geographical, and so popular that anyone meaning geographical uses expressions like “western hemisphere” or clear point of orientation “west of…”.
It’s just projection as always
someone please explain?
The little black box with a screen is a pager. Pagers have been in the news because Israel made a bunch of Hezbollah pagers splode, in case you somehow missed all of that.
Correction: They made pagers explode. Hazbollah preferred, not a necessity.
This pissed off alot of libs lmao
What’s this got to do with libs? Comparing TikTok or other Chinese goods to a literal bomb doesn’t make sense, but whatever.
Every single one of those downvotes is from a lib lmao
You see braindead americans saying shit like that about Chinese products all the time; this is a play on that.
Can someone show me on a map where “the west” starts?
Right in the middle of Berlin.
(This information may be 30 years out of date)
A western colony primarily made of western settlers and completely aligned with imperial core countries is western.
It’s a political term rather than geographic. Same reason why Australia isn’t part of the Global South despite being in the south, because it’s controlled by colonizers.
Is it Israel that is completely aligned with these “core” countries because I see them as a terrorist state and I sit firmly in the west.
Israel, along with most western countries, have been bombing (or building bombs) the Middle east and North Africa for decades now.
Ireland is in the west and has recognised Palestine and condemned Israeli actions.
Ireland has some good foreign policy positions due to being a victim of british colonialism for hundreds of years, and feeling affinity with other victims of settler-colonialism, but after the civil war, they fully adopted the model of governance of their oppressors.
Ireland is now just like other western states, ruled by finance capital, and suffers all the same problems (a housing and rent crisis, production exported to low-wage countries, etc). A lot of US tech companies even use Ireland as an off-shore tax-haven.
BAE and Boeing (who manufacture weaponry used against Arab countries and in Palestine) have plants in Ireland. They also let the US use their bases in its war on Iraq, and had active troops in the war to break up Yugoslavia, and also had troops to fight against Syria.
Ireland is kind of a case-study in what not to do after an anti-colonialist revolution.
Is it fuck a case study of what not to do, in 100 years we went from not recognised as a state to the highest labour productivity in the world.
We absolutely did not allownfornour bases to be used by foreign military. We did however allow for refuelling by an ally. We also had caveats about what type of aircraft and cargo could land and refuel.
Oh yes we have heard the tax haven criticism before, butthurt people complaining about how we incentivise foreign investment. As a result ofnpolicies like these we created duty free and duty free industrial zones, which was the initial reason for the headquarters in Ireland given their logistical benefits from setting up here.
We also did not wholly adopt anything, we have a different type of government, we dont have a monarchy and our elections are not first past the post.
I would like to see some stats on the manufacturing being exported because we actually have a lot of foreign companies set up manufacturing here and have done for a long time.
Seems like you dont want us to be on the right side of this issue, for some unknown reason, so you threw out some nonsense.
Labor productivity is a neoliberal metric that uses GDP per capita, that in actuality measures value captured, not value added.. For example, the most “labor productive” countries in the world, are those tax havens in the caribbean. Considering the Irish economy’s dominance by finance capital, that’s completely unsurprising that it would rank so high:
The reason that these large companies utilize child labour and forced labour and labour under such conditions is simple; profits. This is where Ireland comes into play, in its role helping these large multinational corporations maximize the profit they gain from exploiting such labour conditions. Of the five companies named in the lawsuit, Apple, Dell, Google and Microsoft all have their European headquarters in Ireland. So, one would logically ask why this might be. Perhaps it is our highly skilled and trained population? Or maybe our location on the very western edge of the continent makes it more convenient for big-wig employees to fly to and from Ireland? Or could it possibly be that these companies are attracted by the striking beauty of our cities, towns and wild landscapes? Or, may I suggest, is it our friendly, open, hospitable and charmingly roguish nature that means companies cannot help but to set up their regional headquarters here? Or could it be that Ireland is essentially a tax haven that allows them to maximize their profits?(14) Ah, yes, I think we’ve found the solution to that riddle then. The study, authored by Thomas Wright and Gabriel Zucman, reveals that U.S. multinationals book roughly 18% of their foreign profits in Ireland, more than anywhere else in the world.(15) Ireland’s laws also help U.S. corporations to achieve a pre-tax profits-to-wages ratio of 800%.(16) In the end this amounts to Apple owing the Irish government €13 billion in back taxes, and a legal dispute with the European Union. In 2016 the European Commission ruled that Ireland had given unfair tax advantages to Apple to the sum of €13 billion, a decision which the Irish government itself appealed. Eventually the decision was overturned by the European General Court in July this year (2020), although further legal challenges to that decision may be forthcoming.(17) It is also important to note that the figure of €13 billion is only for the case of Apple and does not include how much taxes other multinational companies may owe, so the actual figure is so high it does not bear thinking about.
We also did not wholly adopt anything, we have a different type of government, we dont have a monarchy and our elections are not first past the post.
Ireland is a bourgeois democracy / capitalist dictatorship just like GB, and it doesn’t matter what form your elections take. The important point is that capital (specifically finance-capital) stands above your political system. Australia also doesn’t use FPTP, yet its able to use that voting system to continue its colonization and theft of aboriginal land. These alternative voting systems have proven to be no obstacles in the slightest for capitalists.
We absolutely did not allownfornour bases to be used by foreign military. We did however allow for refuelling by an ally. We also had caveats about what type of aircraft and cargo could land and refuel.
The US racial state, which built its wealth on the graves of its indigenous inhabitants, and enslaved millions of captured Africans, is not a good military ally to have. If Ireland were actually anti-imperialist, there would not even be a debate on allowing the US military to use its bases, especially given the context of its wars on Iraq.
Here’s another good article on Ireland’s role in imperialism and its internal crises.
Essentially every country settled primarily by Europeans or their descendants, except somehow Latin America, Russia and Belarus, and, debatable, a few other European countries :D And potentially including Israel
The reason latin america is excluded from the west is because 1) they don’t exploit other countries via finance capital, and 2) most of them preserve both their indigenous cultures and populations, in a way that would be intolerable to US or Israeli settlers.
Here: https://xkcd.com/503/
the west is not really a geographic term, and its not really well defined either it has 3 main uses:
most commonly: the west: as in western europe and their settlers colonial offshoots (excluding Spanish and Portuguese ones but including the Spanish and Portuguese themselves)
most uselessly and confusing: the west: as in the global north (also not geographic) in its entirety
and less commonly: the west: as in all european cultures or cultures derived from europe, so most of europe and all settler colonies
excluding Spanish and Portuguese ones but including the Spanish and Portuguese themselves
What ?
excluding Spanish and Portuguese colonies but including the Spanish and Portuguese people themselves i guess i should have said Spain and Portugal instead of referring to their people.
But why exclide them ? Is this an american thing ?
they are excluded because the term is descriptive, these countries are excluded by the west from many agreements and organizations, they are exploited by the west and its systems of imperialism. Culturally speaking they are similar but geopolitically speaking they have nothing in common.
Oh ok ty
It’s less a geographical or hemispheric distinction, and more a political one.
This page on imperial core is good.
Should Greece really be on that list? The only criterion where it’s not grayed out is “Awarded Parts of China to Japan”, which actually means “signed the Treaty of Versailles after WWI”. And unlike many of the other countries that signed it, Greece did not get anything to itself from it.
Seems more like globalism is to blame. They were from a Taiwanese company but manufactured in Hungary.
Guessing the source of the pagers didn’t matter at all and Israel probably intercepted a shipment to plant bombs in them themselves. Lithium batteries can ignite, but they don’t just explode like that. There were bombs put in those pagers, be it by Israel or whoever else, coordinated as a targeted operation.
Lipo’s can absolutely burn your house down, but only while overcharging. Igniting a battery while you’re walking around with it will at most burn your pants down, not kill you.
Yeah as in BURN DOWN and not as in EXPLODE WITH FORCE AND SHRAPNEL.
Exactly. I remember early days of smartphones before a lot of the safety precautions we have today were implemented, where we saw tons of videos of batteries spontaneously combusting. They expand, there’s a pop, and then a small burst of flame that will ignite anything it touches, like your pants, tables they’re sitting on while charging, etc. You can get pretty badly burned if this happens while it’s in your pocket.
It’s just that the videos that have come out of these pagers shows an actual explosion, as if they had been packed with C4. Enough to instantly kill some people with them on their person and harm adjacent passerbys.
So it wasn’t just here in Italy that they tried to make us believe it was just a cyber attack… On national tv they brought up an old man so called expert who said they probably disabilitated overheating protection remotely and somehow magically the battery exploded causing that damage … I don’t know if I need to interpret this as an attempt at psychological terrorism or just one of the usual diminishing policy in favor of Israel To be fair they mentioned the probability of an actual bomb but in my opinion such an obvious error must not be carried over especially world wide 😱 It gives me chills that the news industry could make such big errors also while talking about politics crime health …
Those people are idiots. You always need to check the credentials and history of people telling you something, and even then - if they’re an expert in security they may know nothing about electronics or explosives or how secret agencies operate.
And yes, news can be really unreliable - on purpose or just out of mistakes. Gotta always keep that in mind as well, but it also reeeally depends on the particular media company.
You can absolutely make a lipo battery “explode” by overheating it by drawing too much power. But it’s the kind of explosion where it spews hot gas and maybe catches on fire. You’ll definitely get hurt, but that’s about it.
You can do MUCH worse by overcharging it. (note the size of that battery). There will eventually be a fireball if you overcharge it and keep overcharging it when it’s already swollen to a balloon. But you generally don’t charge stuff while it’s in your pocket.
These were actual killing-people-explosions. Lipo batteries don’t do that.
deleted by creator
Yeah I know i think that everyone that has ever heard of Lipo fires and dangers with a basic Google search can distinguish between a lipo fire and a high explosive detonating … Lipo are more like a jet of flames ( I had one in my 6 m^3 room wasn’t nice but I’m here) yeah contained what you want It could be a bang, but to some extent… I don’t know what you have seen but videos shown in my local news are impossible to explain with lipo fires …
Can’t find a link sorry
errors
Assuming it was totally inadvertent. Totally.
Lithium batteries can ignite, but they don’t just explode like that.
These pagers don’t use lithium battery.
So what other kind of battery would a pager be using that might explode if not lithium? Hydrogen cell?
(CH2N2O2)3
Not a battery but sure, that’s what I was suggesting.
My point is that the lithium battery angle is a diversion and isn’t even relevant.
I’m out of the loop here.
Hezbollah uses pagers for communication. Israel intercepted shipments of pagers and rigged them with bombs. Then, an unspecified amount of time later, Israel detonated them during the day, yanno, when people would be out and about in public places. Thousands of bombs went off across Lebanon and killed and injured children, elderly people, and adults.
Of course, mainstream media is trying to pretend that Israel didn’t potentially commit what should be considered a warcrime while assholes on social media are spinning this as a masterfully precise and accurate strike that didn’t have a considerable amount of collateral (I’ve literally seen someone say “only people with something to hide would be around a pager in this day and age” verbatim), and that anyone injured or killed was a member of Hezbollah.
Like, what if one of those had been on a plane when it went off?
When ISIS plants bombs on people and detonates them in public places then it’s a bad thing. Israel does it and everyone stands, claps and tips everyone with $100% bills.
Edit: I honestly wonder if it’s only a matter of time before some IDF or Mossad shithead hijacks a plane and flies it into the Burj Khalifa.
