Links and Stuff
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Yesterday's discussion post.
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It's interesting to see how western propaganda makes the western mainstream completely unable to make any useful analysis of Russia. If you believe that what happened at Azovstal was an agreed "evacuation" you are going to make a radically different analysis about the relative strength of the warring parties than if you know the truth about it being an unconditional surrender. Garbage in, garbage out.
It's even worse, because that article says that it was a surrender, but that that's actually a failure for Russia because they didn't kill them all. So it's garbage wrapped up in even more garbage in a kind of propaganda turducken.
If they killed them all there would be endless crying about the Azovstal Massacre by the cruel and heartless war criminal Russians
Instead we're going to get some hilarious show trials where they trot out a bunch of naked Nazis and we have trial proceedings like "Your lawyer says that you got a tattoo of Hitler holding hands with Bandera by mistake after "A week of hard drinking where numerous mistakes were made". Really? That's really what you're going with?"
:data-laughing:
I honestly expect Russia to not execute any Azov (maybe some frothing mad ones) and I don't expect videos of their trials. I imagine the punishments for the repentant Nazis will be public tattoo removals and community service (hard labour rebuilding infrastructure) Imagine the propaganda win of videos like "Former Nazi having tattoos removed." "Before and after Nazi turns his life around" They intersperse the tattoo removal with clips of them saying how horrible a person they were and how they are getting a second chance at life showing them at work. They don't say anything political till the end where they admit they were war criminals paid by the government of Ukraine to terrorize and murder civilians. It might be hard getting it past the lib sensors on social media but eventually I think it could break through and destroy the "brave heroes of Azov" narrative.
:parenti-hands:
Western "journalists" are basically all just sitting in a building in Kyiv getting spoon-fed propaganda by Ukraine. They are happily not even reporting on anything with their eyes fucking open.
Given some of the allegations of trafficking underage girls against the oligarch that Zelensky works for, you might even say they have their eyes wide shut
WaPo is fake news
What pisses me off about Wapo more than anything is that it's just a mouthpiece for Bezos but the fucker won't make his propaganda rag free, even though it's a rounding error in his net worth.
The paywalls are not about income they are about shutting out poor people. You make specific articles free if you particularly want those ones to reach the proles.
There are also several other important psychological aspects. People that buy in are materially investing themselves in your content. They become invested in the same way that videogame players become invested in their games and feel like they as a contributor to the "community" are part of the product. This makes them brand evangelists for your content when it's out there in the social space, incredible spreaders and defenders of your bullshit. This investment also entices them to become more deeply invested in actually paying attention to authors, forming parasocial relationships, buying into the ideology deeply, etc etc.
Most reliable western journalism