Trump's victory, and the further mass oppression of minorities, is closer than ever before. May god have mercy on our souls.
previous preamble
The totalitarian capitalist dystopia which was created by the United States in the aftermath of the Korean War has increasingly experienced problems as the multipolar world is being gradually birthed.
Due to the widespread exploitation of the population, long work weeks, and high housing prices, the population growth of South Korea has plummeted, with the lowest fertility rate on the planet, and the highest suicide rate in the OECD. While a capitalist "success story" before the 2008 recession in terms of profit accumulation for the richest at the expense of most others, conditions have grown more dire in the Long Depression since the crash. GDP growth per year has averaged out at 2-3%. For more concrete figures, labour productivity has stagnated, particularly in the service sector. The rate of profit hit a peak when the dictatorship ended in the late 1980s, but has since massively tumbled. These dynamics are not unique to South Korea; they are happening throughout the West.
While South Korea is stagnating, perhaps even falling, its northern neighbour is rising. With Russia already persona non grata to much of the developed world and yet still maintaining fairly good economic growth and continuously albeit gradually moving towards victory in Ukraine, Putin sees no reason to be intimidated by the West's shunning of the DPRK, and Russia is establishing ties as well as military and economic deals. This seems to portend an end to the post-Soviet period of forced isolation due to UN actions forbidding the people of the DPRK to leave the country (which many westerners believe is a policy originating from the Korean leadership due to their propagandized education).
Many in the West are still, regrettably, unable to properly analyze the geopolitical situation of Korea due to their government programming, leading to bizarre takes about imminent collapse, or desperation on the part of Russia or the DPRK, unable to recognize that the DPRK has a powerful military sector all its own, and decades of autarky has created a durable society where limited resources must be used efficiently and effectively. The position of the Korean Peninsula seems likely to be a critical part of the US-China conflict, whether this is an outright war or instead a series of proxy wars. Indeed, Korea's position may soon become very important in global trade routes if the US tries to cut off the Strait of Malacca to Chinese-bound cargo ships, with vital resources like oil and food potentially transported both over land and via the Arctic Route over Russia and through the DPRK to China. Russia's leadership clearly sees the importance of Korea in the future, hence their actions now; and, of course, South Korea siding with Ukraine has also forced Putin's hand to oppose them more openly.
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 South Korea! 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.
any newsbrains want an invite to iptorrents, a general private torrent tracker? you need to be able to seed/leave a computer on to stay in good standing. if you want one, dm me an email address
I'm just going to say that iptorrents is the shadiest of shady torrent sites. They've been known to blackmail their users, ie disable random users and demand donations. They have a system of requiring users to seed equal amounts to what you down which is normal, but they also allow people to pay real money to download without seeding, which is very shady.
I was personally a victim of an attack orchestrated by IPTorrents around 2015. IPTorrents has been known to wage attacks on other torrent sites. I was a member of a more respected private torrent site. IPTorrents staff stole the seeds list from the private torrent site I was on and injected them into the public torrent site known as Kickass Torrents. Basically IPT took my home ip address and exposed it to the public in a malicious attack. I was seeding to a very private torrent site without a VPN and IPT maliciously exposed my seeding to the public with the intent of getting me into legal trouble.
evidence https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/34iov0/ptp_suffers_another_peer_leaking_attack/
I'm not gonna say what they did was good, but your home IP address was already public to anybody on the site before they did. And that could have been anybody. Use a VPN, kids.
Yes but also no. Private torrent sites use a user key verification system. Each user has a unique tracker key and you can only get the peer list if you have a tracker key and you only have a tracker key if you are a user on the site. This was a website with less than 30,000 users in total and you could only join the site if you were vetted by the site staff with very strict requirements.
The main risk of torrents is copyright trolls. Copyright trolls are companies that make legal threats on behalf of copyright holders. They send out massive amount of copyright to the ISPs of whatever IPs they find in a peer list. These trolls are not really a threat on such a site. The staff are constantly looking for suspicious activity and banning suspicious people. Also it just doesn't happen. If it did, it would get posted on the forums and it doesn't.
What had happened was that a user had become compromised by IPT. It was theorized that IPT had somehow taken the usernames and passwords from their own site and used those to try to log into other sites. It is possible that IPT stores passwords in plain text. Then once they had a compromised account, they picked the most popular torrents of the year. Then they uploaded the same torrents to Kickass Torrents but injected the peers from the private site into the public site. If I remember correctly, IPT had rented a server just for this purpose and set up a public tracker service on a server solely for the purpose of this attack.
The attack was intended to expose the users to copyright trolls which are not present on the private site because copyright trolls monitor public torrent sites but not private sites.
This was back in 2015 and I did start using a VPN with torrents after the attack, but also I am not going to ever forgive iptorrents.
Yea idk anything about that. I've been on there for a very long time and I use it to download shit for free.
deleted by creator
this is pretty true of most private trackers but IPT is more of an organized crime business. iptorrents is a for-profit operation. IPT owns 5 different torrent websites and each one of them charges money for special privileges on the site. iptorrents lets you pay money for an account if you don't have an invite. iptorrents allows you to not seed if you pay money. I've even seen iptorrents running raffle schemes where you buy gambling tickets and they claim you can win a game console or something but I doubt they pay out. The owner of IPT was doxxed like 10 years ago, he lives in Moscow, which is probably how he avoid prosecution from western countries.
the "fart huffing" private trackers are usually nonprofit, they accept crypto donations but turn off donations when server costs are met. I think the idea of this is that accepting less money means that they have less heat on them so to say and they care more about sharing than the money. The top private torrent sites preserve around 4-5 petabytes of content each, which I think is kind of noble. I wouldn't say that they're politically motivated though. They're mostly just bored IT workers I think.