Image is of Azerbaijan's President, Aliyev (left) and Armenia's President, Pashinyan (right) in a meeting a month or two after Azerbaijan took Nagorno-Karabakh.
- Never go to a second location.
- Always get the interior ministry post.
- Never get in a helicopter or any small aircraft.
- If someone with a gun enters your car, they’re gonna kill you.
- If someone tells you they’re not going to kill you, they’re calming you down to kill you later.
- Never give up your nukes.
- Never release the opposition's political prisoners.
- Never let the opposition delay elections.
- If someone starts to get into German runes, drop them.
- Never trust a South American with a German name.
- Never move anywhere for a religion.
- Never go into the sewers unless you’re a sewer guy.
- If someone’s trying to get you to commit a crime, they're FBI (sometimes CIA or military intelligence).
- Never become an FBI informant.
- If you do become an FBI informant, record everything.
- Never relinquish your arms.
- Always get it in writing.
- If you keep gambling, you’ll eventually win.
- Never talk to cops without a lawyer.
- Always pay your mercenaries.
- Don’t let anyone take your passport.
To add an addendum to rule 3, never put your President and Foreign Minister in the same helicopter or small aircraft. Especially if doing so in bad weather conditions. Especially if you're already under threat from a hostile nuclear power in the region with a proclivity for terrorism (though this probably isn't Israel's doing, in this particular case).
Anyway, Azerbaijan. Not a great country, I think. Did some genocides. They're a petrostate that is hosting Cop29, which I suppose is a way for the bourgeoisie to implicitly convey their contempt for the green movement. They got weapons from Israel, too.
Just for the record, there's an Iranian province called East Azerbaijan, which is not the same as Azerbaijan.
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 Azerbaijan! 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 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. - 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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
This is old news and not of great importance but it's a silly little story about the uselessness of liberal western progressivism that I don't think has been posted here before:
On May 8th the chairperson of the Copenhagen Pride organisation resigned to appease angry corporate sponsors who were cutting funding for the parade.
What angered companies like Google and Mærsk so much was a statement put out back in February by the pride organisation in which they declared that the organisation "stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people" and stated that the organisation would "voice concern over business activities in 'Israel' and the occupied Palestinian territories" to their partners.
Sponsors and the liberal establishment were deeply offended by the statement that they saw as a demand for them to take a stand against the genocide. The pride organisation demonstrated a complete lack of backbone as soon as the sponsors they depend on fire funding started leaving and put our a new statement apologising for "poor communication" and promised that they were "not asking any questions or making any demands" to their partners regarding 'Israel' and Palestine.
Eventually the chairperson decided to resign as a way of appeasing sponsors.
Received mainstream wisdom as communicated through the mainstream media quickly settled on siding with the sponsors. Everybody seems to agree that it was foolish of the organisation to say "please don't be an accessory to genocide" to their corporate sponsors, "experts" in the media are talking about how the pride organisation needs to fire their top leadership and grovel at the feet of corporate sponsors and everybody who have opinions for a living are talking about how you shouldn't connect LGBT rights to "a complex conflict in the middle East".
Denmark remains the model Nazi colony to this day
Pride in my country won't even kick out reactionary political parties from the arrangements. Libertarian adjacents who are fine* with gay people but who believe there's only two genders and it's determined at birth. Like, everyone who participates in pride hates you and you hate us, but because it's a mainstream political party we do this civility bs, otherwise it would be political, and just let them have their stand there. There's basically never a week passing without these guys making a transphobic statement so just chose any one of them and use it as a a reason to kick them out. Pride is political, if you can't tell homophobes and transphobes they're unwelcome, what's even the point?
*as long as they're not too loud or visible
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There needs to be more written about how western liberal feminism, social progressivism, and LGBT activism has just become a tool for neo colonialism, especially post 2008 financial crash, with the liberal parties in the west changing stances to assimilate these socially progressive movements. This is not social progressivism, this is social regression.
It's honestly left me extremely disillusioned with social progressivism, even though I am LGBT myself and have faced discrimination and have had to keep all my relationships secret.
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it's becoming the new human rights concerntrolling I think. as in, everybody should obviously be supportive of human rights but when it's constantly used by imperialists to justify absolutely heinous shit, it's hard not to get a little cynical about human rights sometimes. I'm a Marxist feminist of course, so perhaps attacking along that angle would be best. not against feminism, but against liberal feminism. it might get co-opted by fascists who would just boil down any argument against progressivism into based soyjak traditionmaxxing romanempirepilled whateverthefuck even if you state that you're a communist in the argument, but I don't know how to fight that co-opting.
I'm also unsure of what exactly to think of, for example, the shit going on in Uganda right now with very harsh anti-LGBTQIA laws which are being responded to by the West with, of course, sanctions. saying "everybody here sucks" feels like a cop-out because the West clearly is favored in the power dynamic here but I don't really know.
It's the undermining of universalist values by Eurocentrism. Samir Amin wrote about it extensively:
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Yes, thank you for being the only one not implying that we're inevitably entering a new dark age of homophobia! Thank you for suggesting a plan of action! I needed this.
I'm a doomer when it comes to this. I think LGBT has almost been completely coopted as a tool of Western imperialism and that the vast majority of countries who don't submit to Western imperialism will double down on queerphobia as a vulgar way of combating imperialism since bashing the queers is the path of least resistance. Because of this, queer people living in those countries will flock towards Western NGOs for safety and support, where they will be groomed to be agents of Western imperialism. What happens if the only source of information for HRT comes from some Western NGO that has a history of grooming ringleaders of color revolutions and is being actively surveilled by counterintelligence because of its role in color revolutions? Or even worse, what happens if that Western NGO promises hormones but you have to participate in fake protests, literally dangling hormones in front of desperate dysphoric trans people who need HRT? At a certain point, those governments will just choose to liquidate queer people, justifying it as a liquidation of traitors, the mentally colonized, Western sellouts, and weak moral d-words. And the really sad part about this is that their fears aren't even that completely off base because I don't know how many queer people will force themselves to live their life as a cishet for the sake of anti-imperialism or any other ideology for that matter. It doesn't work for queer Evangelicals forced to live their life as a cishet, so why should we expect this to work for any other ideology?
Queer people everywhere should be free to live their life as their authentic selves. And what happens if their only option of living their authentic selves is through the doors of a Western NGO?
Cuba is a little ray of hope in this regard
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Letting Zionists play the reverse UNO card so Isntrael can BDS you.