Image is of the Cuban flag and the Pride flag on the Havana Health Ministry building.
Inspired by a highly upvoted recommendation by @Commiejones@hexbear.net:
We need to kill the Mega Posting Wars meme. It wasn't very funny to start with and now I get the feeling some people are taking it way too seriously. Clogging up the news thread with bullshit just to try to out post the trans mega is just dumb and annoying.
The News Megathread is now under trans martial law:
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Loving trans people on this site and elsewhere is strictly mandatory.
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Posting about the "comment wars" between the trans and news megathreads is now strongly discouraged inside the news megathread. No shame in it - I also recently made jokes about it - but though they were almost always just jokes, it was unrelated to current events and was beginning to feel more like padding the comment count instead of trying to improve the quality of the thread. If you want to boost comments and engagement here, then post articles and analysis!
The COTW (Chemical of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific chemical every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied chemicals. If you've wanted to talk about the chemical 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 Chemicals of the Week are Estrogen and Testosterone! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.
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.
Cops are lumpenproles
Is it good reporting?
They're not, they have a job
Drug dealer also have a job. Functionally they serve similar function though to lumpen of yore.
I know it’s kinda dumb theory, cause lumpen is basically a bucket of we don’t know wtf they are doing, but with two classes only police is hard to classify
Drug dealers are working and have their own means of production. They're petit bourgieoise, like other merchants.
Police is proletarian class traitors. They work for the bourgieoise to oppress the other proletarians.
Lumpenproletariat seems to be those without access to the means of production. Jobless people, disabled people, and people who have to steal to survive.
The key to a proletarian revolution is seizing the means of production, which jobless people don't have access to, so marx excluded them (fuck him for this).
Nah, their salary is a lot higher than your average prole. They're closer to labor aristocrats/petty bourgeois looking after their own class interests. On paper, their salary is already like a labor aristocrat except that unlike a web developer making an equivalent salary, pigs have lifelong pensions, get frequent opportunities in making 2x overtime pay watching a bunch of passive demonstrators, and have other benefits by virtue of being pigs. They get put on "administrative leave," meaning a free vacation, whenever they fuck up but since they almost never suffer any real consequence, there's almost a perverse incentive to continuously fuck up so they can always be on administrative leave. Like, pigs can still keep their job even after murdering people.
I think people are thinking too statically when they say that people who earn a lot of money are still proles because "aktually earning a lot of money isn't the same as owning a means of production." People who earn $300k per year aren't stashing their money in a bank or blowing it all on fancy cars. They're pouring their money into investments, and when the amount of investments reaches a certain point, you're no longer a prole.
Yeah, labor aristocrats.
Now that I think about it, labor aristocrats really seem to be a distinct class from normal workers. The class interests are way different.
but it wasn't what was described as lumpen (such as it was) during marx time, it was more akin to gangs, odd jobs in the community.
Anyway if they are proletarian class traitors, they are proletarians no? Their salary doesn't depend on how well stock market is doing, it might (in usa) depend on how properties are doing, but thats not true in europe.
I just think that attack on taibbi is somewhat incoherent from marxist pov. He is dumb for other reasons (akin to greendewald of how the free speech warriors will eat his face), and general levels of trust to government