Image is of the Cuban flag and the Pride flag on the Havana Health Ministry building.
Inspired by a highly upvoted recommendation by @Commiejones@hexbear.net:
We need to kill the Mega Posting Wars meme. It wasn't very funny to start with and now I get the feeling some people are taking it way too seriously. Clogging up the news thread with bullshit just to try to out post the trans mega is just dumb and annoying.
The News Megathread is now under trans martial law:
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Loving trans people on this site and elsewhere is strictly mandatory.
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Posting about the "comment wars" between the trans and news megathreads is now strongly discouraged inside the news megathread. No shame in it - I also recently made jokes about it - but though they were almost always just jokes, it was unrelated to current events and was beginning to feel more like padding the comment count instead of trying to improve the quality of the thread. If you want to boost comments and engagement here, then post articles and analysis!
The COTW (Chemical of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific chemical every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied chemicals. If you've wanted to talk about the chemical or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Chemicals of the Week are Estrogen and Testosterone! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
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. - 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.
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.
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.
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.
Latest report from ASPI, who produced that widely talked about report early last year about how China has taken the lead in 37 out of 44 critical technologies that they track, or about 84%. They have expanded their scope this year to 64 technologies, in which China leads 57 of them, with the US leading the other 7. Just 20 years ago, the numbers were essentially reversed.
ASPI notes that, in the US, "private-sector research is increasingly concentrated in US technology giants"; back 20 years ago, the technological lead was spread across several more (typically US-based) corporations, but now only the largest corporations/monopolies truly matter when talking about the private sector. Massive Chinese corporations do not play nearly as big a role in this regard. In the public sector, US institutions like NASA still matter greatly, but the Chinese Academy of Sciences is an absolute colossus, by itself leading in 31 out of 64 technologies.
China is the top player in the following categories of technologies:
China is only mostly the top player in the following categories of technologies:
The competitive field is:
I count 14 technologies in which China is bigger than every other country put together.
Other findings were:
There are about 55% the number of publicly traded companies in the US compared to 1996. There is less than half the number of public companies per million people than there was in 1996. The GDP has doubled in that time (inflation adjusted) and the so-called "Buffet Indicator" that tracks the total market cap of US public companies against the GDP has a ratio of 202%. In 1996 this number was about 100%, during the height of the dot-com boom it didn't reach 150%.
So I guess what I'm saying here is there has been a massive consolidation of corporations over the past few decades and if we take at face value the capitalist line that competition drives innovation -- well the competition is drying up in a lot of cases. Taken together with the neoliberal tendency to cut literally every public service to the bone and it's no surprise we're falling behind a country that has essentially done the opposite over the past 30 years.
A side effect of the Varoufakis idea that we are in fact ceasing to be public governments, replacing the actual functions of government with private corporations and vesting actual power in corporate offices, a side effect of that means government is less coordinated and effort is duplicated.
Instead of NASA plowing billions into the Saturn rocket program, now SpaceX and whatever Bezos’ space company is called and Boeing are all duplicating effort.
Which runs counter to the consolidation argument. Like, I think both arguments are true to different extents. Part of the problem is of course consolidation and the direction of effort to extracting rents rather than competing absolutely that’s a huge possibly even bigger part of it. An economy that’s being strangled by all these rents being collected by monopolists and the highest achieving maths whizzes going into finance and tech instead of science. 100% true.
But another part is ironically the decentralization of research effort as it is privatized.
A slight side-track, but this always pisses me off when people say things like "well, war might be terrible, but it does drive scientific progress..."
No it doesn't! It just centralizes research! It forces a bunch of disparate capitalist scientific institutions to be directed by a central body, with the goal of actually making breakthroughs instead of just finding new ways to make profit.