India Pakistan

I've only seen evidence of one Rafale shot down (along with debris from the Chinese PL-15 air-to-air missile that hit it), but there could be more. The Rafale was only 12 miles from base, so on landing approach. Looks like the pilot either mentally switched off or else literally switched off his countermeasures. The export PL-15 has a 90-mile range, so the Pakistani fighter (also Chinese-made, probably) could have been a long way behind, but the Indians should have known it was there. They got caught napping, looks like. If there were multiple losses like that it's quite bad.

It's pretty tough to glean details in this conflict. The Bharatiya Janata Party (Modi's party) has a pretty substantial propaganda / troll farm / fake news sites operation going, with ties to the intelligence services à la Russia. Plus the nationalist wing of the party's supporters acts a lot like MAGA online and will go to war on anything that makes the current Indian government look bad. So, social media is fairly tainted as a source.

The Pakistani government isn't exactly renowned for being honest either, and the majority of the conflict takes place in region where a lot of places are very difficult to gain access to both geographically and diplomatically. So, reports from from the region have to be taken with a large pinches of salt too.

Add to that the usual pitfalls of proper sources (counting incidents several times, honest misunderstandings) and it is quite the quagmire.

Basically, right now we're mostly down to reading between the lines and speculating.

who we picking on this one to battle it on on the forum like sports teams? I kind of hate them both. what one will victor pick. india and Canada have like the worst relationship ever after they assassinated a citizen and cried about it after getting caught red handed . and Pakistan is full of jihadist Muslims.

Science has been downplaying the threat of nuclear war lately. so maybe it wont be so bad for the west. It might fix the birthrate problem!

Leftists like Victor dont actually formulate their own thoughts and opinions. They just follow what the tribal hive mind tells them to. So far the leftist hive mind hasn't really established an opinion, and they may never. As Lucium notes, this conflict doesn't really fit into the leftist anti-western ideological paradigm; so the left may just nap it out completely.

IPL has been suspended. India will be angry that they had to do this.

I have nfi what the what you call "hive mind" thinks (apparently only leftists consult it) , but I want to see a plebiscite in Kashmir to see if there's enough support for the full independence initially wanted by Hari Singh.

its pretty wild how no one talks about this, even me who's pretty plugged in and a history enthusiastic know little of India including history . like this is 100x more important then gaza.

It doesn't help that the information is 100% propaganda

https://x.com/LeadingReport/status/19206...

BREAKING: VP Vance says India/Pakistan conflict is ‘fundamentally none of our business.’

/

This in a nutshell is the isolationist coherent position.

Pro Pax Americana rightwing people like me and Dunyan fundamentally disagree, but that position (even if from the left it tends to be expressed in terms of "we care a lot about the conflict and we hope it stops even if we aren't willing to do anything to achieve that") is growing in both tribes :-(

thats not breaking my dude.. thats like 24 hour old. see what i mean? no ones paying attention and then when they do its only about their country

For most people on the forum, these are two foreign countries to which we have few personal ties. And while the conflict is not completely isolated to Kashmir, that is where most of it takes place. And it is a remote region pretty much by any outsider's standard.

Israel / Palestine on the other hand is a conflict with ties to "western"-derived cultures going back for at least the better part two millennia, and it has become deeply ingrained in much of our political and religious views.

Something as simple as keeping track of the various players by name in the India / Pakistan conflict can become tricky when they come from a series of language traditions most of us have precious little exposure to. By comparison, I can recite names from the Israel / Palestine conflict from when I was a little kid, which is probably in itself fairly descriptive of a sad state of affairs.

tankies support Kashmir. I havent looked much into it to decide but last time I was ambivalent on the tankie position was Syria and boy they sure nailed that one.

I know zero jews and like one muslim. I know like 50 indians. is america not also overun by indians ?

How do you know zero Jews, one Muslim, and 50 Indians? How is that possible?

Doesn't seem either sensible or necessary.

It's not wild. People don't give a **** about what doesn't touch them.

Gaza is the wild thing, because enough cultural power has been spent for enough time by enough powerful people, to create the exception of making enough people care about something they wouldn't give a **** otherwise.

It's I/p that is a uniquely constructed tv show basically, that is weird, that is an obsession for many people.

Other events worldwide even if relevant don't matter to most people until they are personally touched by them.

I mean in January 2020 when china had already started circulating those fake videos of people dropping dead randomly in the streets, people still didn't gave a **** about COVID.

the muslim was also indian. its called small town canada? I don't know any black people either. if I ever met a jew irl they certainly didn't advertise it. since they look like normal white humans how would I even know. Canada has 50x more indians then jews and muslims and the ones that are muslim are Indian lol. but we still won't care

ya but even ukraine/russia got more eyes then this before it even started.

It was Kashmir thirty years ago. It's been a flash point for as long as I have been an adult.

As Lucium states, the anomaly is how emotionally invested the Western and Islamic world is in the I/P conflict. And this investment is a testament to how well elites in both the western and Islamic world have been able to exploit lizard brain tribalism of their common people, to basically distract them.

If not for elites manufacturing interest for their own ends, there is no logical reason we should care any more in I/P than what is going on in Aizerbaijan, Myanmar or 10 different places in Africa that have very little geostrategic significance.

Ukraine/Russia materially affect lives in the EU.

We had a monthly inflation akin to that of the Arab oil embargo in the 70s because of that war for example.

Real (after inflation) wages went down more than any other year since WW2 in Italy in 2022 (something like -8%).

I might have added that back in the day at least I/P mattered for oil prices in the west, so it made more sense for the west to care.

But it has been a long long time since it doesn't matter anymore

Trump brokered a ceasefire, and no one has had the decency to show up in this thread and thank him.

Sorry, just woke up. Trump did it. Time to celebrate.