It's my weekly rest day, so no update today.
I just want to thank everybody who has engaged with these threads, from the frequent commenters, to the background lurkers, and even the people who come in thinking this is the main megathread and start telling us about their banana bread recipe or something like that.
I'm hopeful that my daily schedule will stabilise for at least the next few weeks, if not months, and I can finally get a reliable stream of updates rather than those punctuated by random breaks.
Of course, may the war end soon, and may Azov, Right Sector, and every other group get what they deserve. And, of course, these threads will continue past the end of the war - unless the end of the war coincides with a sudden and brief increase in the air temperature to several million degrees in every city on the planet.
Yesterday marked the 72nd day of me doing this. I'm gunning for 72 trillion more.
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.
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 ~ Gleb Bazov, banned from Twitter, referenced pretty heavily in what remains of pro-Russian Twitter.
https://t.me/asbmil ~ ASB Military News, banned from Twitter.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster - crowd-funded U.S journalist, mostly pro-Russian, works on the ground near warzones to report news and talk to locals.
https://t.me/riafan_everywhere ~ Think it's a government news org or Federal News Agency? Russian language.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Front news coverage. Russian langauge.
https://t.me/rybar ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
With the entire western media sphere being overwhelming pro-Ukraine already, you shouldn't really need more, but:
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.
Yesterday's discussion post.
It's so fucking funny to me that like, Sweden and Finland both confidently strode up to NATO and were "We want in." and the whole media cycle for a day or two was journalists - who think that they're uniquely intelligent people whose opinions have any more merit than anybody else's - making articles with headlines like "You often meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it. Putin has brought us together into unity and together, autocratic regimes will never prosper." And then like a day later, Erdogan comes out of nowhere and stops the whole parade.
Like, this is the funniest thing that could have happened, and I feel bad for not predicting it based on the principle that the stupidest and/or funniest thing will always happen because we live in a dying world run by failchildren and the failchildren of those failchildren. And it's similar for Orban blocking the oil embargo for so long. Like, it sucks so fucking bad that the only people who are putting up any fight against this are these horrific quasi-fascist turds (aside from the really principled ones, like the Portugese communists or some of the more left-wing groups Sweden or Finland).
But there's few things I like more than watching liberals eat shit on their takes and predictions, and some overpaid motherfucking journalist who starts half their articles with a quote from the Iliad, writing an article about how Turkey and Hungary should be kicked out of every organization and sanctions put on them that you can obviously tell was written with incredible seething anger - watching their fury is like nectar from the gods to me. These are some of the most passively evil people on the planet, people who are doing propaganda for this genocidal global empire but actually fully believe the bullshit to their core, and them crying over their keyboards is just :chefs-kiss:. Really hoping for the day when I can get a Liberal Tears mug and have it not be automatically assumed that I'm a weirdo chud.
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No one is immune to propaganda and that includes the propagandists peddling their bullshit. If anything, the propagandist is more exposed to propaganda by virtue of being a propagandist, so it's only a matter of time before the propagandist has their brain melted by their own propaganda.
There’s a psychological phenomena where you begin to believe things you recite out loud repetitively, even if you fully consciously disagree it. Propagandists who know they are spouting lies start with cynical lying manipulation, then they still half believe it in a semi-detached way, and finally they fit it into their cohesive worldview to fill in a gap unconsciously.
It's not a total surprise than Turkey would fuck it up for them, because NATO conceptually doesn't make sense anymore and hasn't since 1992. The war in Ukraine absolutely has extended NATO's lifespan yet another 30 years like some fucking evil neromantic lich ritual - honestly, absent this I think we would have seen it dissolve of the course of the 2020s. France and Turkey have been at loggerheads forever, Greece and Turkey obviously aren't best friends and haven't been forever, and there are so many euros that wouldn't want to risk war for the sake of France/Lithuania/pick whatever NATO country really.
I've heard this a lot from western leftists but I don't understand it at all. NATO survived for 30 years after the USSR fell, what makes you think it was on the cusp of collapse now? I don't think that NATO would have collapsed any time soon if that dastardly Putin hadn't intervened in Ukraine's civil war.
Many NATO members have historical tensions, Turkey-Greece, Macedonia-Greece, France-Turkey and they have worked at cross-purposes historically. Sure, NATO lasted for 30 years post USSR but it wasn't like they were just coasting and would've sailed for another 30 - they were actively trying to find another paradigm to get the alliance to go on. Bosnia, Afghanistan, anti-piracy off the coast of the horn of Africa, Libya etc. And that definitely worked for about a decade and a half but the NATO-as-human-rights paradigm was starting to shudder.
It didn't help that NATOs mission in Afghanistan was failing for 2 decades before finally ending in utter failure and the other missions they went on weren't exactly winners either. Trump and that section of the GOP was doing their best to bust up diplomatic relations (for their own and the other national bourgeoisie set's interests over the international bourgeoisie), who knows how that could've turned out absent a Ukraine conflict because Biden has also continued some of those Trump geopolitical choices too. They've been searching for the "pivot to Asia" since at least Obama but NATO's existence always sucked away some of their capacity to shift the imperial war machine out of Europe (because the academic types that run foreign policy have recognized America's decline in capacity to do both at the same time).
Not saying the West would've played nice in Eastern Europe though, lol. It just wouldn't have been NATO, would've been a German led EU style response as America withdrew from Europe. Russia's intervention gives a plausible reason for NATO to continue and for member states to choose to stay in and refocus that's better than the now very worn out "global human rights police" that's been failing.
Honestly, that could explain why the US was so determined to instigate war with Russia - NATO was becoming a relic so there is motive to manufacture a war that justifies its prolonged existence/maintenance.
Whether ultimately Russia or US is more responsible for the war (for the sake of argument) I don't think there is any timeline where the US lets their NATO institution collapse without a fight - which lines up with Hudson's analysis: this war is just as much about re-asserting US leadership in Europe as it is about combating Russia.
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Lol, stop. Reading that part made me call the Volcel Police on myself.
:panting: