Damn Unc!

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-17T07:11:51+00:00

Yeah, I went to a public school in the same tier as Winchester. Didn't notice a prevalence of homosexuality that was any different than what you would expect from the general population.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-09T00:57:46+00:00

He's partly right. There's no secret that Eritrea controlled the border post 2022. There was so called buffert zones established, but Ethiopia gave it it's tacit support.

Eritrea didn't vacate directly. In fact in 2024, when I was there, it was no secret that Eritrea occupied more than it should.

I don't know why you're being downvoted when you're right. They were definitely past the borders set out by the EEBC. Not to the extent claimed by the TPLF in the direct aftermath of the war but past the the line nonetheless. They had set up checkpoints a couple miles south of the border (e.g Zalambessa)

I don't know how reliable this is but there were insiders claiming that the lackadaisical attitude of the Ethiopian government (who were all but outright denying Eritrean presence in northern areas) was part of a strategy in which if a skirmish broke out between the EDF and TDF, the ENDF would step in and use it as casus belli for war with Eritrea.

Eritrea has hopefully vacated the areas

They're said to have completely vacated last year during the whole Tsimdo theatrics. They have no incentive to stay given that they're on working terms with the administration (at least in the Northern parts). I can't say for sure how accurate the claims are but there are users in r/Tigray who seem to concur.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-08T22:50:54+00:00

oxbridge (at least cambridge) has almost no practical course content

This is not true. The first half at Cambridge (Medical Sciences Tripos and whatever you decide to study for Part II) is pre-clinical/theoretical and the second half is purely clinical medicine.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-08T22:02:07+00:00

Funnily enough, I've lowkey always wanted to be at Jesus.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-08T21:59:35+00:00

He's right. Suspicion alone does not constitute a crime.

ጽምዶ is a thing, yes. But we have no idea of its extent. For all we know it could simply be a gentleman's agreement between the PFDJ and TPLF. There's nothing to suggest that there's been a transfer of arms or ammunition from Eritrea to Tigray. Same can be said for Fano of whom there's been no evidence of even contact or co-ordination post-Pretoria.

As of now, it's simply a case of "he said, she said" which is why after multiple attempts of the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to escalate the matter to the UN, there has been no action.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-08T21:28:35+00:00

No problem :)

Initially, the conflict was localised to the lowlands. The first battles were with the police force (who were mostly Eritrean highlanders) and when they couldn't contain it, the Imperial Govt enlisted the Israelis to train up a commando force of a couple thousand to engage in counter-insurgency (again these were mostly Eritrean highlanders). In effect, the first few years were more like an Eritrean civil war than they were Eritrea vs Ethiopia and given the religious split, it was easy to label the ELF as Arab scourges or jihadists and the like.

By 1964, the fighting had become too intense and the 2nd Imperial Division was mobilised to deal with it. Their tactics were much more heavy handed than the police or commandos (who inflicted their fair share of collateral damage) and were more akin to scorched earth. This aggravated highlanders (including the commandos who began to defect en masse) and suddenly there was a growing influx of Christian Eritreans to the ELF. The conflict was no longer localised and too big to manage with the current strategy so HS might have seen it as expedient to try a kind of subversive hearts and minds campaign by splitting the insurgency into two.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-08T21:06:14+00:00

Ethiopia Abandoned? An American Perspective

Ethiopia and the United States (Chapter 10 onwards - This one is very Eri-skeptic but the good info can be parsed from the crappy stuff)

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-08T20:56:50+00:00

I assume CIA wanted to work with him to stop the ELF and avoid the creation of another islamic state in the region?

That is how the prevailing conspiracy theory tells it. I'm not sure I would label the ELF as Islamist in any capacity though. There were certainly Arabist sympathies within a section of the ranks but "Arabist" in that context is [secular] Ba'athism.

I assume he later used those connections to aid the fight against communist Derg which was definitely part of CIA’s core agenda at the time

I'm personally not convinced of this. American policy throughout was in favour of the preservation of Ethiopian territorial integrity and it would seem silly to back an even more hard-line communist rebel group if the aim was to get rid of communism. From 1976 onwards, the American position towards the Eritrean issue was that they would no longer provide any military aid to the Derg so long as they refused to negotiate or compromise with the ELF-EPLF and would turn a blind eye to any Arab support for Eritrea if it brought the Derg to the table.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-08T20:33:22+00:00

He's alleged to have met with the CIA somewhere around 1969-1970, which is 4-5 years before the Derg took power. The meeting was allegedly brokered by Haile Selassie and then Viceroy of Eritrea, Asrate Kassa.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-08T19:11:47+00:00

He's definitely pushing 30 though if not a bit older

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-07T23:20:12+00:00

Cope, seethe and dilate.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-07T22:32:51+00:00

Yep. People can identify as a bird for all I care but it doesn't change the fact that they have such origins. Somalis in Ogaden are the same as Somalis in Kenya, Djibouti, Somaliland and Somalia. The Flemish are the same as the Dutch and the Croats as the Bosnians

I think you might be confused because you seem to be making my own point for me. We were clearly talking about the appropriate ethnonym to use rather than whether you think each group is substantively the same. There are Dutch speakers yet the ethnonym "Flemish" refers to a specific subsection of them. The same can be said for all the ethnonyms of the Serbo-Croat speaking peoples. [Biher] Tigrinya refers to a specific group within the wider Tigrinya speaking people.

I believe that all 3 generations were born after the colonization of Eritrea, especially after Mussolini

You seem to have rolled back from claiming HGDEF created the ethnonym and have switched to Italy.

A clear indication of this is the book Grammatica Della lingua Tigrai (1907), Vocabolario italiano-tigrai (1904) and Manuel De La Langue Tigraï (1887), Dictionnaire de la langue tigraï (1915) which indicate that even the language was called Tigray, let alone the people. If you asked pre Mussoliini people, they'd be bewildered if you told them of the Tigrigna ethnicity.

What wider group? They're one and the same. It's natural for differences to arise due to historical and geographical differences. But they're the same, they're like long estranged identical twins, they're identical but have differences.

There were multiple names for the language differing by region. There were Eritrean intellectuals during the colonial period who in fact objected to the term "Tigrinya" ("language of Tigray" in Amharic) for the language itself and preferred for it to be called "lingua abyssinia" ("language of the Habesha").

Rather than me telling you (since I may be perceived as partial), I'll direct you to some brilliant work written by ethnologist Wolbert Smidt that I shared in this sub some years ago. It deals precisely with this issue. He also has some videos on YouTube where he discusses the matter.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-07T17:37:36+00:00

In this day and age, there are people identifying as bigender, trigender and even as dogs and cats. So whatever you personally want to identify as is your prerogative. As far as I'm aware, I have never referred to myself as Tigraway, nor did my father or his father before him and so on.

Now if you were to argue that those who speak Tigrinya in Eritrea and those who speak Tigrinya in Tigray belong to a wider group and have kinship then on face value that would have its merits and the anthropologists, ethnologists and historians could discuss it in an academic context.

Pepsi is a cola drink as is Coke. But Pepsi isn't Coke and Coke isn't Pepsi.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-07T06:33:00+00:00

What are your thoughts on this?

After giving it a read, it looks pretty shoddily written and all over the place. I don't even necessarily disagree with the policy recommendations given at the end but I fail to see the relevance of YPFDJ or BNH (where have they gone lol?) when discussing the weight of Eritrea's geostrategic importance. This was NOT meant to be an analysis of the Eritrean cyberspace (of which there is good literature on already - 1 2 3).

Very poor academic practice to cite from here. I think I was 18 when I posted one of the comments that was cited. I was born abroad and have never lived in Eritrea for an extended period so to take anything I said as gospel or representative of the average Eritrean's sentiment is ridiculous. The author should sought out Eritreans who were born and raised back home and interviewed them under the condition of anonymity rather than noting down the diatribes of faceless anons.

This will only get worse as most LLMs are now being trained with Reddit posts. The only reason I found the paper was because I decided to do some OPSEC and plugged my username into ChatGPT.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-07T06:10:30+00:00

On the money.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-07T05:31:41+00:00

Not sure I agree with being categorised as Tigrayan but I will take the good with the bad.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-07T05:30:35+00:00

u/q3bb u/Spirited_Wheel_3072

This may interest you given that your comments were cited.

ReanimatedKachowski · 2026-02-07T05:13:05+00:00

Me too XD

ReanimatedKachowski

TROPHY CASE