Image is sourced from this article.
It takes very little effort to find an article from Western state propaganda decrying Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas as authoritarian and rife with human rights abuses. This is the natural reaction the US has to any successful liberation movement. This fairly long report from Jason Cohen, a socialist who travelled to Nicaragua one week ago, should quell any suspicions.
He describes a country with high political consciousness among the masses, who are working to construct critical infrastructure for the country and their communities. There is a virtual education system that is free across the entire nation, which serves the dual goal of democratizing education and ensuring that those in rural areas or without much free time for university can still achieve degrees and a quality education; and these classes cover technical skills in the production of infrastructure and agriculture, but also political and ideological education in order to counter the fascist propaganda produced by imperialist nations abroad.
While Nicaragua is deeply invested in its nationality and national figures who led to their socialist revolution, such as Sandino, they are also immensely proud of their indigneous history, recognizing it as also part of their anti-colonial history which continues to the present day. Additionally, they honour the struggles of other nations on the continent, such as the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, as well as Castro in Cuba and Allende in Chile. Countries around the world are also celebrated and admired, such as Burkina Faso; during the Reagan administration, Nicaragua and Burkina Faso were comrades in arms, and now Traore is continuing the legacy of Sankara's anti-imperialism in the present. Perhaps most relevant today is their dedication towards Palestine, involving the creation of the Parque Palestina (shown in the post image), in which the Palestinian flag flies alongside the flag of Nicaragua. In July, Leila Khaled of the PFLP gave a speech in Nicaragua, in which the solidarity of the two nations was highlighted.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country 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 Country of the Week is Nicaragua! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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.
China citing the US Social Security age among reasons of raising the retirement age was not on my BINGO card
Edit -
Can we have some sober conversations on the retirement age without accusing each other of racism or chuvanism ? They put this out on their state media - CGTN. That is not a western mouthpiece. China is our peer. They hold over 1.5 billion human lives.
The reason this suprised me was because when Bernie 2016 campaign was going on there was a LOT of discussion on Social Security. Expanding it, lowering the age. Medicare in particular and the phasing it to lower the age of eligibility until we were all covered.
While doing research I found some pretty sobering numbers.
If you look at the social security ages of death from birth stats Approximately 1 in 5 do not make it to 60. Approximately 1 in 4 do not make it to 65. That is the human factor in raising the pension age.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Body.html
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
It’s just a random Chinese professor though and not even a government official
Try telling that to the people overreacting to this shit lmao
"China shouldn't be judged by the standards of the west"
China literally judging itself based on the standards of the west
God damn seeing people's reactions to this is making me doom hard again.
China's done. It's over. China has fallen. The US reigns supreme yet again. Have fun with another 69420 years of US dominance. There is no more Communist party of China. It is now the capitalist party of China. Xi Jinping has personally unvieled two katanas and used them to slice apart the hammer and sickle and replace it with a dollar sign, signifying the true end of Chinese communism. This alone has been the greatest betrayal in the history of betrayals. Communism will never recover, and it is all because of the Chinese.
Clearly it's time to nuke China. Time to assault Chinese people on the street. Time to support the United States in its struggle against Chinese imperialism. Time to support East Turkestan. Time to support Chinese internment camps. They are revisionist so they deserve it of course.
Forget it. I'm more pissed at people here than I am at China. I don't fucking care anymore.
A lot of people thinking theyre smarter than the CPC these days (And pretty much always also)
The western left is still mired with chauvinism, there has always been the issue that the "oriental" socialism isnt up the standard to the white's man socialism, that is more brutal, uncouth, less "ideological" sound.
The CPC has a lot of liberals
Hexbear doing the clickbait anti-china thing where a random proffesor/media person/low level official says something means "China says", weird
Either way expecting the retirement age to never change from an age set when the average life expectency was 50 years is naive. Cuba has higher RE, some eastern bloc countries had higher than China before the change, some the same ,some lower.
Uniquely tho China does need to bridge its current level of development and economy to a highly automated and cleanly electrified one in 30-40 years that can sustain and provide without the same anormous enormous human capital demands as today and for that to happen, since indeed their labor force is slowly shrinking and aging and there is a missmatch of labor demand and supply in certain sectors, a gradual 3-4 year retirement age raise from a low base seens like a huge help.
Idk what the "socialist" idea is? Magicaly make automation increase by an order of magnitude in a decade or import one hundred million workers from the global south
What on earth are you even talking about, how on earth is it clickbait, HOW ON EARTH IS IT ANTI-CHINA, its literally China Global TV Network, you know, LITERALLY THE STATE OFFICIAL TV NETWORK.
What more do you want? Do you think they'd ever say something as important as this without approval?
Holy shit the mental gymnastics to avoid an L.
It's always a wonder watching the random ass places non-white inferiority complex rears its ugly racist head
Pension policy of all places??? Are you fuckin kidding me?
Time to go Hoxhaist, Hexbears. Sick of this revisionist shit.
Through a constant shifting of rhetorical focus by Dengists China has been described as both too strong and too weak, never able to affect change in a way that isn't beneficial to themselves.
Dengist: It's actually good that China is filled with the human equivalents of cerberus pitbulls running most of the economy because a marxist PMC is holding the leash. Oh, there he goes getting dragged along with it.
deng would hate dengists lol, deng advocated mostly for a temporary existence of special economic zones for foreign investment. Deng considered the growth of a new national capitalist class to be the downfall of socialism in the country. By dengs own standards china is revisionist
One thing to remember is that Chinese life expectancy is a few years more than the US
Does working people longer at that age translate into more "productivity" though? Does that translate to longevity or a better quality of lfe?
Depends on the job. I had a staff member who refused to leave until she was 75 because she valued the work and it was a big part of her identity.
I would like to see more mechanisms for low intensity work a couple days a week for older workers - expertise from 40 years of experience is invaluable. Increasing CPC membership among women and standardisation the retirement age between men and women could also be useful goals.
Medical general practice and TCM training for older women would also assist in unfucking the free market healthcare reforms and is the sort of work that would be ideal, not physically demanding and not necessary to be undertaken full time.
Whether the best way to reform this is about slowly dismantling the Hukou system and replacing it with centralised standardisation or providing more autonomy to local government, I'm not sure.
once again, state socialism is superior and market 'socialism' fails to deliver
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Right at the start this idiot starts with a talk about how they are still healthy as if the point is to work and work until you are unhealthy. Its the fucking 21st century, we have technology and rising productivity, some countries, neoliberal countries even are toying with reducing work hours and here are these ghouls trying to excuse raising the retirement age.
Completely soulless and ghoulish and imo there is simply no excuse that doesn't borrow from our enemies rethoric so it is what it is I'm sure this is all part of the "great plan", try to cope I guess.