Israel trying to pass the hospital bombing off as Palestine doing it is utterly disgusting and guarantees Netanyahu a spot in the deepest pit of Hell for all eternity, obviously, but do not forget that
a) the only reason why Westerners will believe it is because they want to believe it - they are not being brainwashed and this is not some masterful propaganda being weaved around us to turn kind-hearted people into monsters,
b) no Westerner opinions matter at all. In most Western countries there is no real anti-Israel option to vote for even if they did realize that Israel was a giant factory for crimes against humanity, and Westerners protesting against things in general almost never achieves anything (tens of millions protested for BLM in 2020 and not only did the situation not change, it got worse), and
c) the people whose opinions do matter (both the people in the region, and the leaders who aren't already Zionist compradors) already know that Israel is full of shit and that they just murdered nearly a thousand civilians in a single bomb attack.
It is despair-inducing to think that the genocidal Zionist entity is so brazenly, so smugly getting away with bullshitting this away into a cloud of confusion, as they release their metaphorical squid ink just like they did with the stupid babies story, but the propaganda and the media narrative that they are creating isn't what matters. It cannot address the fundamental contradictions ripping the country, the region, and the world apart any more than masterfully-applied makeup can fix a stab wound. It can merely obfuscate.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is still Palestine! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The weekly update isn't coming because I'm sick and too focussed on the collapse of the Zionist entity.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
If the GOP really want to take over the federal government, they would just find an excuse to enact martial law via the GOP-sympathetic military. This, of course, assumes that the Democrats are an opposition party when they are not. The Democrats and Republicans together are a form of domestic counterinsurgency. It's for this reason that you'll never see the Republicans purge the Democrats or have them combine into a single party like how most dystopian fiction predict.
What you'll most likely see is a "temporary" coalition formed between the Republicans and Democrats against a major national crisis. Through this coalition, a committee is formed that vets candidates for major offices to "ensure loyalty to the American state." Eventually, the committee will either openly or not-so-secretly reject prospective candidates who don't belong to the Republicans or Democrats or any other controlled opposition party that's part of the coalition. The committee would be comprised of the president, the chief justice, the speaker of the house, and two senators that balance out the party composition of the committee. For example, if the president and speaker of the house are both Democrats, the two senators would be Republicans. This is to ensure the committee is "balanced" and "nonpartisan." De facto control would, of course, be handed to the president. De jure and de facto power is more and more concentrated on the president.
As the crisis, real or manufactured, never seems to go away, the "temporary" coalition becomes a part of daily political life and the committee is just the president plus 4 benchwarmers who rubberstamp whatever the president wants. There would be further calls for "bipartisanship" and "nonpartisan" politicians, but since those politicians are already vetted by the committee, those "nonpartisan" politicians are politicians who are loyal to the new regime. There will be laws that stipulate certain positions like governors have to be "nonpartisan" while senators have to come from both the Republicans and Democrats in order to keep the masquerade of bipartisanship. Pretty soon, most politicians would be "nonpartisan" who's only loyal to the committee ie the president.
IMHO, this is how the US becomes an open one-party state. The playbook plays into US civic religion that Americans will fall for it hook, line, and sinker.
Why would the US ruling class even want a one party state in the first place? The current setup works perfectly fine for them with the formal bourgeois democracy and the red vs. blue theatre giving people an illusion of choice and makes them buy into the system instead of trying to overthrow it.
I agree, the process that AssortedBiscuits is describing has largely already happened over the past 50 years. The omnipresent threat has been "Terror" since the Soviet Union fell, the US ruling class alone could not execute some Caesarian business plot coup to keep themselves in power because they are already totally and permanently in power. It would also destroy the still somehow very important pretext of "Democracy" in international affairs.
A more likely scenario would just be a permanent populist liberal coup by someone who can personally manage democratic will for things like infrastructure and healthcare with the interests of defense and finance oligarchs, but that would require reigning in the defense blob at which point our entire point of America's continued existence would have been compromised.
I think the current status quo of the two-party political theater is still not seriously threatened. As demonstrated by the George Floyd uprising, Democrats performed their role of domestic COIN with flying colors. If it was just a GOP single party state, the US would've probably plunge into civil war at this point. But Democrats functioning as the carrot to the Republicans stick was able to successfully disarm the potential insurgency. This is why Project 2025 is just some bullshit fear by electorialists who don't understand what role the two political parties actually perform. And in the end, there's always martial law if the two parties can no longer perform effective domestic COIN.
That's one that always weirds me out and that I can never really wrap my head around. Despite the vary obvious way the US operates - Democracy is a bad joke at home and a threat abroad, the legal system is a farce, etc - A lot of the people in power have some bizarre faith and conviction in whatever it is they think "Democracy" and "Rule of Law" are. It constantly throws a wrench in my attempts to analyze them
You are right. They don't actually need a one-party state since the two-party system is perfect political theater. My outline is mostly to push back against liberals who think Republicans would round up Democrats into concentration camps or the Republicans and Democrats would somehow combine to form a single political party. That's what Project 2025 is essentially, which is why you mostly hear about it from radlib types trying to push people into voting Democrat.
I don't think that the two party system is entirely, or maybe even primarily, theater. a republic's function has always been to peacefully adjudicate disagreements between bourgeois factions. there didn't use to be even much pretense of popular representation