Image is from the January 2023 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Over 50 heads of state and 600 CEOs attended.
holding flashlight under face
Imagine a terrifying world where we are all ruled by monsters of every stripe. And not hot ones like werewolves, but instead decaying zombies and mummies who are both insensitive to, and actively benefit from the immense suffering they cause on a daily basis. The top echelon of society, filled with profit-seeking, bloodsucking vampires. And the worst of it is that they repeat on a daily basis that what they are doing is not only just, but there is no other possible way to do it.
Pretty spooky, right? What if I told you that this world... was our own?
Happy Halloween!
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
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.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This week's first update is here.
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.
Been a real adventure watching posters flip from “he’s going to nuke Tel Aviv” to “well of course he wasn’t going to do anything, I knew that all along and this is genius 10D chess actually, this actually proves that total war is coming”
Ima be honest with you chief, it comes off as some real cope. “Trust the plan” vibes.
I think the nothingburger speech was just that. Just like Putin’s speeches weren’t followed by shock and awe, so won’t this one.
Still isn’t as bad as the “Putin/Prigo is just a Russian psyop” cope from earlier
I must admit that my prior assertion - that they would bring out a comically sized red button that said "Nuke Tel Aviv" for him to press - was wrong
bro, if at the end of the speech he pulled out a cartoonish big red button and pressed it, even if the button did nothing it would be enough
I called it a nothingburger before the speech happened
I practically did the same a few days ago, but then all the hyped, cinematic trailers made me think that maybe shit was actually going down, fuck
I hoped he would shit on turkey and saudis more. Even with low expectations i got some sort of "we see you we hear you".
On one hand expecting other people to sacrifice their lives is evil, and every single fighter is sacrificing more than me already; on the other - i don't understand how people inside organizations can reconcile their rhetoric vs their actions
I don’t want them to die for western idealism or expect greater sacrifice like some decrepit manager. I’m commenting on the response here as I’m not really qualified to critique what they do or don’t do and I’m not interested in doing that. I’m just saying that platitude speeches aren’t usually followed by extreme escalation.
Yeah, seems weird to me that you would announce all of your plans via speech anyway. I mean, Ukraine does it but they're Reddit Country.
Some are.
But i meant that it didn't lay out any plan of action so to speak, it didn't say "brothers in turkey, blockade the ports" "brothers in jordan, stop your military airfield", that type of stuff which requires mass action. The speech could have been much more, without any military threats
He did call on arab nations to stop sending oil.
To the west, turkey is not arab nation
I don't think there has ever been a speech irl that preceded something major. It's always something major happens and then the speech happens for the very simple and obvious reason that you don't tell the enemy what you're going to do before actually doing it. It's the same deal with people getting mad that Chinese diplomats issue out completely bland statements calling for peace. They're obviously not going to act belligerent and whether help China will offer will be completely behind closed doors and under the table that you'll never find out until decades later and that's only if someone in on it decides to air it out in the open in their memoirs.
You better damn hope that Biden/Xi meeting doesn't happen then lol well at least I do. The walking corpse will say something completely bonkers and some people will say he is making a fool of himself as usual(which is true) while at the same time giving 20 different reasons why China-US relations need to improve actualy and dialogue is good, meanwhile just the usual US sponsored genocide and/or war happening next door.
This is what I’m talking about, what diplomats say and what they want may or may not be the same thing, and putting real stakes into public speeches is kinda silly.
Is China that gullible? I don’t know, but I’m also not gonna pretend that they’re secretly going to nuke America tomorrow.
America may be the most feeble it's been since the end of ww2. But that doesn't mean it's not a genocidal war machine with enough air power in the area to cause mass devestation. So every nation is just going to do what they have done since the 1960s and just watch Palestinians get massacred and in private comment, better them than us.
Israel has been bombing syria for years and ayria just takes it. Same with iran. There's really nothing they can or are willing to do.