Image is of a Russian missile impacting Ukraine.
As we rapidly approach the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Ukraine War (an anniversary I absolutely did not expect would occur while the two sides were still in combat), we have seen Russia turn to a new strategy, starting late last year but intensifying in December and now January.
Russia seems intent to disconnect Ukrainian cities from the electrical grid by focussing bombing on thermal, gas, and hydro stations, causing major power blackouts across the country. Russia is also bombing substations relatively close to Ukraine's three nuclear power plants (Zaporzhye, the fourth, remains under Russia control), studiously avoiding hitting the premises of the NPPs themselves for obvious reasons. Even if they're far away from the NPPs, striking the substations does have risks, because if the nuclear reactors aren't shut off before the substations are bombed, there is a possibility that there will be insufficient backup power to prevent a meltdown - hence why Russia hasn't really attempted to do this for four years.
Most of the electricity generated in Ukraine comes from the nuclear power plants, both because of the infrastructure they had initially (Ukraine was 7th in the world in nuclear electricity generation before the war) and because Russia has bombed most non-nuclear power stations and substations already. Over the last couple weeks, we have seen Ukrainian media fly into a frenzy about long-lasting blackouts, especially in the middle of winter. After the Zionist entity destroyed virtually all civilian infrastructure in Gaza while the West cheered on, they now appear to have changed their mind on whether such strikes are an effective and humanitarian option to subject millions of people to.
Regardless of whether you personally believe these Russian strikes are justified (I'm pretty iffy myself), it must be stressed that Ukraine has been bombing Russian tankers and oil refineries and power stations for a long time now, so in a sense, this is a retaliation. It's also remarkable, compared to Western wars, that Ukraine was even still allowed to possess a functioning electrical grid for nearly four years into a war of this magnitude. That all being said, while Ukrainian strikes have been somewhat but not overly impactful on the Russian oil sector, the response is clearly very asymmetrical: Ukraine's power grid is, according to Ukrainian energy corporations, now 70% degraded and is virtually impossible to now repair, and blackouts can last most of the day.
For everybody's sake, I hope a ceasefire and peace deal will be reached soon. But after four years of seeing opportunities for an end to this war squandered over and over, I'm not holding my breath.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
What? We should judge arguments on their merits, not on how long the person making them has been here. Every account here was just a week old at some point.
It's also particularly silly to invoke this in a discussion with xhs, one of our most prominent examples on this site of people deleting accounts and making new ones (although I think the xhs account has actually hung around for quite long compared to some of the previous ones).
The whole paranoia about new accounts being wreckers or otherwise suspicious could never really coherently fit in with the simultaneous site party line about the importance of opsec, and practice of account switching. In fact, I'm pretty sure we've already had this struggle session, but I've kind of lost track of those.
I'm trying to call this out specifically because I remember the last struggle session about this and was fedjacketing people a bit too much myself at the time.
I'm not passing judgment on the arguments, I think the discussion is interesting.
I'm referring to the age as evidence of whether the account's responses are llm assisted, where it carries a small amount of weight.
I don't see how that tracks. They themselves have mentioned that English isn't their first language, and I could see an argument for that being proof of them using an LLM, but just because an account is new doesn't mean they must be using an LLM, I don't understand how "new account" and "LLM" are related in any way.
And I can't believe I'm defending LLMs, but the actual content of an argument is what is important, not whether they used an LLM to help deliver it. LLM speak is bad because it usually waffles on about nothing and fails to have a clear and direct point, entire paragraphs with 0 information. But I'm not getting that at all from QinShiHuangsShlong's comments, they have clear points they are making. Sometimes people get so hyper-vigilant at spotting "AI speak" that they forget that AI constructs sentences that way because a ton of the data it scrapes from speaks like that.
It just feels like a low blow to accuse them of using an LLM rather than addressing the points they make in their argument, xiaohongshu might as well be calling them a fed or a wrecker, because that seems to be the intention behind this "polite" accusation, to discredit the person rather than address their argument.
Like it or not, I've seen my ESL coworkers use AI to write out their emails. Critical support because it's a world-historic injustice for people to be forced to learn English.
To be fair XHS is addressing their arguments as well, just not in that same comment
To be clear, I am not criticizing the poster’s English here. I am criticizing the sophistry that simply does not address the points I made, but instead presented a lot of beautiful words strung together without coherency.
Read this paragraph for example:
Read it again and see if it even addresses my argument.
Have I ever said that the Imperial Court Examination was about Confucian morality? No. I clearly stated that it was a class mobility mechanism that evolved out of deeply rooted traditions and entrenched elements continue to operate in its modern form.
In fact, I never even used the word “Confucian” once, and based my argument solely from the perspective of class analysis. If LLM is being used, then I can see why it got confused and associated with Confucianism because that’s what the examination is often associated with (hence my initial suspicion), but clearly has nothing to do with what I wrote.
There is no argument here, no evidence being presented here, only words. It doesn’t even correctly address what I wrote in my previous comment. You literally cannot respond because there is no argument here.
Again, pure sophistry. If anything, the statement confirms what I said about the gaokao being an extension of Imperial Court Examination that provides a class mobility mechanism that continues to this very day. The statement is saying that after 1300 years, we’re still at the same spot (the examination provides upward mobility to the court officials in the past and the urban middle class today), until something changes (which I don’t even agree with). It even contradicts the poster’s own comment that gaokao is an independent invention of the Imperial Court Examination, which is ahistorical to begin with.
As you can see, these are sophistry made up of beautiful words strung together but do not correspond to reality. There is no historical evidence being presented to support these arguments. Anyone can make vague statements like this, and LLM is especially good at it (“it is X, not Y” that are littered across the paragraphs), regardless of whether the poster is using it or not.
I don’t expect everyone to exercise the same academic rigor as I do, but be careful when you read words like these that don’t make coherent sense.
Finally, if you’re truly interested in actual academic text on the evolution of Chinese bureaucracy, start with the book I recommended above by Prof. Zhou Xueguang.
I think you are misrepresenting what I have written. I will say it again clearly. You are entrenched in an idealist framework where culture and tradition are treated as driving forces of history and development. We disagree on that at a fundamental level.
I have made arguments. You just do not accept their premises, so you treat them as if they are not arguments at all. For example, when I said bureaucracy exists across socialist and capitalist states regardless of cultural background (USSR, modern Vietnam, post-war Eastern Europe), you dismissed this by returning to civilizational continuity. When I argued that gaokao functions today due to material scarcity and labor competition, not lineage tradition, you reframed that as me denying history rather than addressing the material cause.
I have also given counter examples that were not engaged with. For instance, the Soviet Union developed deep bureaucratic contradictions without imperial examinations, Confucianism(brought up due to its deep ties to Chinese culture and tradition), or lineage culture. Patriarchy persists globally under capitalism, including in societies with little to no shared past, which shows that survival of social forms does not mean they are driven by ancient tradition.
You have clearly read many books, but reading history is not the same as applying dialectical materialism. At several points you substitute origin for causation and continuity for explanation. Where something came from is not the same as what reproduces it today.
We are arguing from different theoretical positions. That is fine. But at this point we are talking past each other because you are unwilling to let go of a cultural explanation even when material ones are presented. I think it is better to acknowledge that we simply see this differently. I would however appreciate not being bad jacketed going forward.
Thank you.