Image is from the January 2023 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Over 50 heads of state and 600 CEOs attended.
holding flashlight under face
Imagine a terrifying world where we are all ruled by monsters of every stripe. And not hot ones like werewolves, but instead decaying zombies and mummies who are both insensitive to, and actively benefit from the immense suffering they cause on a daily basis. The top echelon of society, filled with profit-seeking, bloodsucking vampires. And the worst of it is that they repeat on a daily basis that what they are doing is not only just, but there is no other possible way to do it.
Pretty spooky, right? What if I told you that this world... was our own?
Happy Halloween!
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
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.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This week's first update is here.
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.
When Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border on the 24th of February 2022, I was pretty unsure on what position to adopt regarding that war. As the annoying politics guy in the lives of the people I love, I had to adopt an official stance. I spent the first week of the war just confused, then I leaned towards the pro-Russian side because of vibes and contrarianism, then solidified my pro-Russian stance after realising the effects of that conflict for American hegemony across the planet.
Now 600+ days later, I've never been so confident about the legitimacy of an ideological decision. The way the Ukraine-Israel-USA axis has coalesced around being the most delusional, evil and cringe axis in history has really solidified my hate for these weirdos. Hating the illegitimate zionist entity has been the only consistent position in my life, and seeing the Ukraine freaks align themselves with the entity has made my hater life easier. I remind you all of what Chinese social media people said, supporting Russia and Palestine makes you a real geopolitics understander.
Trust in DPRK, they don’t miss. If ever confused I look to them
As I’ve read more about the modern history of Palestine, I think I’m starting to understand at least one reason why Israel and the US are so close: the very existence of Israel and the nature of the Zionist state throws the entire region into chaos. This prevents the Arab nations from being able to focus resources on their development outside of the sphere of imperial influence.
Instead of being able to focus on internal development, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan (among others) have to deal with the refugee issues Israel creates. They have to be on guard against the aggressive Israeli military. They have to deal all the little ways in which Israel fucks with them.
Don’t want to deal with all this? Well the US has the cure to the disease they created! Just be like Sisi or Abdullah or whatever and bend the knee the to US and Israel. That won’t make all your problems go away, but they take the boot off your neck just enough to let you breathe a little.
(btw I know I’m preaching to the choir with you, LargePenis. You are more familiar with these issues than I am so please correct me if I’m out of line at all)
In this way, Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan really are an axis as they serve the precise same functions in their respective regions: to try and divert Russian and Chines resources, time, energy, and focus to having to deal with their bullshit.
Maybe the most cringe, but I feel like the Axis axis takes the cake for being the most delusional and evil.
Yeah good point lmao, maybe the most evil axis of my lifetime
:so-far:
So far
If it wasn't for my party's connections in the donbass I wouldn't have known what's up in the lead-up to the war and probably adopted the second internationalist fence straddler position a lot of the Communists of Europe and America hold and be one of the insufferable contrarians that goes "both sides has fascists"
my lore UwU
Had the same position at the beginning too, I also was slightly on the side of Ukraine at the beginning too, being Algerian I greatly sympathized with people fighting an invader, just like how I sympathize with Iraq and every other country that was invaded by the USA. after a few days of the war and photos of dead Russian soldiers started showing up on reddit, and the amount of slurs and dehumanized cheering thrown at a dead teenager who looked younger than me, but these same people would shed a million tear drops on dead American/IOF and even Nazi soldiers, then when all of the US and even zionist entity support started going to Ukraine I started asking myself, what makes the entirety of this "peace" loving hippie site so bloodthirsty all of the sudden? why is an invaded group siding with an invader of another group? I stopped siding with anyone when asked about it after that until I knew what was happening, because all the information I had so far was based on what some morons on a shitty internet website are saying and sides that are basically down to "muh people and muh shit". My knowledge of politics back then was basically "death to America, Capitalism bad, Poor people deserve to live", but I listened to anyone who had a word to say, and when the "evil tankies" started rolling in with posts that got deleted by admins after a few hours talking about a Nazi Azov and Ukraine genociding ethnically Russian people, the Minsk agreement the NATO expansion, Ukraine wanting to join the NATO, the numbers of bombs dropped on Iraq vs Ukraine, and how pathetic liberals sounded responding to them, like saying that Nazis exist in Russia and somehow that is the same as an official military branch, everything the "tankies" said made sense, so I started lurking in any group that called itself communist, socialist, marxist, leftist and anything like that, and even thought I didn't agree with most things at first, it seemed like the questions I always asked got a real answer, not a bunch of logical fallacies that are different between one person or another, like for example the US invasion of Iraq, if you ask a bunch of liberals vs a bunch of leftists why it happened, you will see the difference between their answers, like liberals will say "it was a mistake, it was 9/11, it was to stop Saddam Hussein...etc" while leftists will explain what imperialism is and how it's linked to the capitalist system. and after all of that I realized that those liberals on reddit weren't cheering for the death of an invader, they were cheering for the death of someone fighting on the side against US imperialism.