I know the Rambo title card is a hoax.
The COTW was chosen in the wake of the aborted sequel to the attempted assassination of Trump being performed by a guy who is VERY enthusiastic about Ukraine, to the point of trying to sneak Afghan soldiers into Ukraine by setting up a house in Pakistan to house them and then further transport them. He also apparently offered to send thousands of Afghan soldiers to Haiti to help them combat gang violence. Whomst among us doesn't have the numbers of thousands of Afghan soldiers on speed-dial. Do you reckon there's a group chat?
Anyway, while there is still no official recognition of the Taliban's government by any country, China has taken a different course than the late USSR and the US - forming economic in-roads, rather than trying their own invasion. This has been a big boon for the struggling country, with various mines and oil and agriculture deals helping keep things barely afloat. A total disintegration of the social fabric of Afghanistan is not in the interest of any of the powers that border it - China, Pakistan, and Iran, with Russia not too far away - so an interesting dynamic of helping-without-official-recognition has been established. I wonder who will be the first country to fully recognize them?
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 Afghanistan! 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 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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
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.
My only ~~problem~~ concern with this is that defeatism is extremely subjective. Every NAFO shithole on the Internet strictly moderates "defeatism" and the end result is a perspective completely detached from reality. On here, people will make shitposts (e.g. a day or two after the occupation of Kursk, someone was like "has anybody told Putin about this yet") and people will get really bent out of shape over inconsequential banter.
I think, foremost, we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously. Whether we are blooming or dooming, it is not like the Axis of Resistance is loading up Hexbear dot net every day and taking cues from our big brain analysis. The Russian MOD isn't reading our shitposts to decide where to commit their resources. The soldiers of Hezbollah and Ansarallah are not going to be deterred from the righteous path because a handful of westoids are suddenly feeling uneasy. BRICS isn't going to unravel just because there are skeptics of dedollarization among us.
We should deter outright panic, but this is a news discussion forum and let me tell ya, most of the news is bad.
The global workers movement has already been defeated. We are only now, two generations later, beginning to claw our way out of the tomb we were buried in at the end of the cold war, and there are still many setbacks ahead of us.
can we at least agree to remove top level comments like this:
This is pretty cut and dry defeatism, without adding any type of factual analysis.
Yeah, there are a handful of egregious examples like this. Even this comment though, has the potential for some fruitful analysis if it weren't such a low effort throwaway.
You could make this argument. The Lebanese Republic is deeply dysfunctional and probably moribund, with or without Israeli intervention, whereas "Israel," even at the bottom of the deepest crisis in its history, with the overwhelming support of the US and it's lousy dogs, has already survived long past its expiration date.
But there are a lot more details to the way this will play out than the picture this poster is painting. The weakness of the Lebanese state is a significant factor in why Hezbollah is able to take matters into their own hands in the first place. Considering Hezbollah is significantly more powerful than the Lebanese army, and politically more coherent (in the literal sense) than the Republic, whatever happens to the government in Beirut seems kind of immaterial as far as "Israel" achieving its objectives goes. They aren't going to just march north and expand "Greater Israel." They are going to face intense resistance, in greater numbers, with greater armaments than they have in Gaza, which they still haven't managed to pacify.
So yeah, the "state of Israel" very well might outlive the state of Lebanon, but so will Hezbollah, so what changes exactly?
I would not be surprised if this user doesn’t realize Hezbollah and the Lebanese government are different entities. The commonality in these overly broad doom prophecies is a lack of granular detailed knowledge.
Lol I do.
Re boredom: I demand they use more emojis in their posts. That's all. They can keep the doom-posting bc that means we get to meme in the replies.
was that Boredom? I've been seeing a lot of questionable takes from that one
They wanted China to annex a part of Myanmar and not even the part of Myanmar that's right next to China but the part of Myanmar that borders Thailand.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Wa_State_Army
I did mention Chin state too but basically I think China should expand into all Communist aligned rebel group areas. It would solve alot of their problems if they abandon isolationism and embrace the creation of a new Asian Union of Soviet Republics instead of just letting everything slowly balkanize.
Yes it was, of “evo morales is a coca addict who legalized child labor and I don’t even want to KNOW his opinion on the age of consent” fame
Yeah that's bullcrap. What I said was that Bolivia has its own child labor unions (that is 100% real by the way) so I really really don't want to research what the age of consent is over there and therefore will not comment on it.
Here here comrade!