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:

  1. Loving trans people on this site and elsewhere is strictly mandatory.

  2. 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

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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.

  • kittin [he/him]
    ·
    24 days ago

    Foreign Affairs - America Is Losing Southeast Asia

    Yankees try to talk about Asia without making it all about “face” challenge: impossible.

    Highlights from long article (summarized using HexB-AI)

    Breaking down this year’s result by country shows that since the 2023 poll, the United States has lost the most ground to China among respondents in Laos (a 30 percentage point decline), Malaysia (a 20 percentage point decline), Indonesia (a 20 percentage point decline), Cambodia (an 18 percentage point decline), and Brunei (a 15 percentage point decline). The United States has also lost ground in Myanmar and Thailand (10 and 9 percentage point declines, respectively).

    The United States still commands very high support in the Philippines (where 83 percent of respondents selected it over China) and Vietnam (where 79 percent did) and solid backing in Singapore (62 percent), Myanmar (58 percent), and Cambodia (55 percent). But only in three countries did respondents’ preference for aligning with the United States over China grow from 2023 to 2024—the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam—and these increases were small.

    The United States has lost support most dramatically in countries with Muslim majorities. The 2024 survey revealed an especially sharp hardening of sentiment from 2023. Seventy-five percent of Malaysian, 73 percent of Indonesian, and 70 percent of Bruneian respondents surveyed said they would prefer alignment with China over the United States, compared with 55 percent, 54 percent, and 55 percent in 2023, respectively. The survey did not ask respondents why they made this selection. But it is telling that when a different question asked respondents to select their top three geopolitical concerns, nearly half ranked the Israel-Hamas conflict at the very top, surpassing the 40 percent that ranked the more geographically proximate South China Sea dispute most highly.

    Western media outlets often carry reports about the debt traps associated with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. But BRI projects are generally welcomed in Southeast Asia for the growth and development potential they offer the recipient country. One high-ranking diplomat from the region pronounced it a model for how to win “hearts and minds.”

    The United States wants to counter Chinese disinformation. But efforts to do so must address the root causes of why they resonate. China has depicted America as a “craven warmonger” in Gaza; many Southeast Asians with whom I recently spoke, including non-Muslims, said that this characterization rang true to them. Such a depiction would hold little water, however, if not for Washington’s own response to the crisis in Gaza, which has supported or at least acquiesced in Israel’s worst excesses.

    Really sucks that Chinese disinformation has so much obviously true facts to work with

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]M
      ·
      24 days ago

      Such a depiction would hold little water, however, if not for Washington’s own response to the crisis in Gaza, which has supported or at least acquiesced in Israel’s worst excesses.

      "this would be very obviously false, if it weren't for the fact that it's true"

      lenin-confused