Israel trying to pass the hospital bombing off as Palestine doing it is utterly disgusting and guarantees Netanyahu a spot in the deepest pit of Hell for all eternity, obviously, but do not forget that
a) the only reason why Westerners will believe it is because they want to believe it - they are not being brainwashed and this is not some masterful propaganda being weaved around us to turn kind-hearted people into monsters,
b) no Westerner opinions matter at all. In most Western countries there is no real anti-Israel option to vote for even if they did realize that Israel was a giant factory for crimes against humanity, and Westerners protesting against things in general almost never achieves anything (tens of millions protested for BLM in 2020 and not only did the situation not change, it got worse), and
c) the people whose opinions do matter (both the people in the region, and the leaders who aren't already Zionist compradors) already know that Israel is full of shit and that they just murdered nearly a thousand civilians in a single bomb attack.
It is despair-inducing to think that the genocidal Zionist entity is so brazenly, so smugly getting away with bullshitting this away into a cloud of confusion, as they release their metaphorical squid ink just like they did with the stupid babies story, but the propaganda and the media narrative that they are creating isn't what matters. It cannot address the fundamental contradictions ripping the country, the region, and the world apart any more than masterfully-applied makeup can fix a stab wound. It can merely obfuscate.
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.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is still Palestine! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The weekly update isn't coming because I'm sick and too focussed on the collapse of the Zionist entity.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
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 ~ 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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
Where are hexbears getting their war info from? I don't doubt anyone's knowledge on weapons or tactics but where do you learn this from
Compulsive news enjoyers and most of us have a toxic hobby of arguing online which makes us have to check our fucking sources and you do this for 20 years and you start to know A LOT about soviet economic planning you know what I’m saying
Ayo I'd love to learn more about Soviet economic planning
Look basically it was pretty good. Allocative efficiency was near perfect and it also achieved better technical efficiency than the west without patent rights. The true economic miracle of the 20th century wasn’t China (which was the economic miracle of the 21st) but it was the Soviet Union. You can measure economic growth from the revolution to the fall and it was the highest average growth in the world, and that’s with a vicious civil war and then Hitler devastating the place just to make it hard mode.
The failure of the USSR was more some kind of failure of morale than a failure of economics. Reform was needed to correct the stagflation of the 70s and 80s, probably a major currency devaluation would have been the most pressing painful medicine, and reform is a constant need so this isn’t an indictment. The Andropov reforms would have been a great modernization. But instead a group of neoliberals gained power in the 80s and instead of devaluing the currency they decided to liberalize the economy which - especially in the absence of a devaluation - unleashed inflation which led to a political crisis, and the response to the political crisis was more liberalization etc until you got Gorbachev and shock therapy which is what actually destroyed the soviet economy.
Gosplan worked very well.
Largely agree with what you said here, but I beg to differ on this point:
The failure of the USSR was very much an economic failure after Khrushchev came to power and initiated the de-Stalinization campaign that reversed a lot of economic and financial policies during Stalin’s era.
I will not go into detail (maybe an effort post at some point) such as the liquidation of collective enterprises (artels) that formed the backbone of Soviet light industries and consolidated them under the state planning program, which turned out to be a disaster.
But a significant turning point happened when Khrushchev defaulted the Soviet government debt in 1957. Both Lenin and especially Stalin understood very well the role of domestic public debt in financing state projects, which is why the USSR could transform from a backward country full of illiterate peasants into a highly industrialized, spacefaring nation within a single generation, while its citizens paid little to no taxes. That’s because Stalin understood that the government has to spend money (by creating them out of thin air) and a consequence of that is the exponential growth of the government/public debt.
Khrushchev basically said in 1957 that “the government debt is too high! we can no longer afford to service the debt!” and froze income payment for the next 20 years (and which never really resumed even after Khrushchev) - essentially, austerity. This led to reduced government spending and the drastic drop in the savings of the Soviet citizens, because the government refused to service its debt (imagine if the US government had defaulted during the debt ceiling debacle a few months back). This was also the inciting incident that led to the Novocherkassk massacre in 1962 responding to labor protests.
To put it simply, the domestic public debt always has to expand because more government spending means people have more savings. The neoclassical economists have this completely backward and believe that the government cannot spend more than what it taxes, which is wrong. Stalin was truly a financial genius for understanding this, which was what allowed him to take the USSR out of the NEP and entered the Five Year Plan starting in 1929.
Trotsky, on the other hand, had the totally opposite understanding of money (read his Marxism in Our Time (1939) text which basically said that FDR’s New Deal will bankrupt America because there’s no way the government can pay for that, and this is simply false and a faulty understanding of how central bank works). This is why the USSR under Trotsky would likely never have gotten off the ground, let alone entering a state planned economy because it wouldn’t have the means of financing its state projects!
I don’t think that’s true, savings rates in the USSR were very high.
In fact it was the very high savings rate that necessitated a currency devaluation.
Basically with a command economy you can control prices and therefore lock price inflation down, but that inflation didn’t go away it just transformed into savings and a “cash overhang”.
https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/1991/055/article-A001-en.xml
None of what you said changes the fact that Khrushchev defaulted on USSR’s quasi-compulsory state bonds (i.e. domestic public debt), which was critical for financing public projects during Stalin’s era at unprecedented scale:
The authors perspective is neoclassical in nature, but the numbers cited are correct. By refusing to expand the public debt, this crushes the ability of its citizens to spend, and therefore straining the productive capacity of its economy.
It is no surprise that economic growth began to slow and plateau starting from 1960, after experiencing almost 30 years of unprecedented growth (in all of world’s history) since Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan in 1929.
This is not to say that this was the only mistake that the Soviet government made under Khrushchev. There were many others when it comes to reversing Stalin’s policies, this was merely one of the major ones.
I think you’re pointing at the same problem just from a different angle. Excess public debt is an excess savings rate when that public debt is held by the citizens, it’s the same thing, a high wealth to income ratio, which is what I’m pointing to. That’s what you’re pointing at as well.
Or am I missing something?
In a capitalist model this would have been experienced as price inflation, which is exactly what happened when they liberalized the economy. In a command economy it’s expressed by too much savings which is what you saw in the USSR over the 70s and 80s. Not enough places to spend the cash so it got saved and created a cash overhang.
The purely neoclassical argument doesn’t really apply to the soviet economy since it was centrally planned and didn’t rely on consumer spending for growth, but this did mean for example TV sets were always under supplied since people had excess cash compared to the price of a TV set. But production of consumer goods at the very macro scale wasn’t determined by a price signal under Gosplan so the neoclassical analysis doesn’t make much sense.
A devaluation would have solved that basically overnight by essentially wiping out savings and the value of debt, albeit painful medicine but less painful than shock therapy where this happened anyway in a chaotic manner via regular inflation.
I think we actually agree on the problem to be honest but you’re looking at it from a slightly different angle using a neoclassical lens.
I pull it out of my ass
deleted by creator
iranian and russian state media pump it directly into my brain and i accept it without question. hail Putin, the anti-imperialist Bonaparte
Video games and Wikipedia rabbit holes for me. Cringe, I know, but it's the truth.
From hexbear
Which parts?
I guess I'm just amazed at people just knowing the military capabilities of a lot of countries but also the limitations of specific equipment. Like someone talking about drones earlier knowing that basically only Russia has shit that can shoot them down or other people knowing how specific battles went down with specific equipment
Like I know its history but are they just watching the news for this info and memorizing it or are there books that go into detail with more modern events?
Lol that was me. Just to be clear, I wasn’t saying that only the Russians have them, but from we know of the use of those weapons in actual battlefield (Ukraine) i.e. battle proven.
We already know that the Patriot missiles have significant flaws in shooting down Soviet era Scuds - if you read the article, some even argued that the interception rate of the Patriot missiles was close to 0% during the Gulf War against Iraqi Scuds.
On the other hand, we know that Ukraine had been firing several hundreds of HIMARS rockets against Russia every month (at least during certain months) and only a handful of them landed and blew up Russian equipments. You’ve gotta wonder where did all the rest of the HIMARS rockets ended up. There are videos of Russian Pantsir fire control panel that showed successful interception of HIMARS barrage, if you follow Russian telegram close enough and scroll through the thousands of video clips every week. So we know that they work to a large extent, we simply don’t know the exact statistics and how well under varying conditions.
Sorry for butchering what you said comrade <3
I don't think (mainstream) news will really tell you much about military equipment, but yeah books & shit are a lot of it.
A surprising amount of the technical aspects of a lot of modern military equipment are actually public knowledge. Unfortunately this is mainly due to the fact that arms manufacturing is a for-profit industry, but the fact that companies are trying to sell their death machines means that they do kinda have to reveal relevant technical aspects of their products to the wider world for the purposes of advertising. On top of that, a lot of modern military equipment is actually quite old, or are at least heavily upgraded versions of equipment that is quite old, and so declassified information on older models of the same equipment can often give you a decent point of reference when trying to understand the capabilities of their more recent upgraded version.
So basically, historians & military equipment nerds will find as much of this publicly available info as they possibly can, and then write books, blogs posts, Wikipedia articles, etc. on whatever piece(s) of equipment they're interested. A good example of this is The Soviet Armor Blog, which has a lot of in depth info on the history & capabilities of a lot of the tanks of the Soviet Union, many of which are still being used by Russia.
Thank you for the source and detailed response
There are several series of books published that go over the literal specs of many weapons systems over the course of history, such as these and my dad loves all of them, it's where I got it from
My dad was really into ww2 documentaries so i learned a bit from that, also i just really like geopolitics and IR do im studying that