Thank you to @carpoftruth@hexbear.net for covering my position as Supreme Dictator of the Goddamn News while I was moving and getting set up in my new home in a top secret Kremlin-funded bunker five hundred feet below the ground. Our regularly scheduled programming returns this week.
On October 9th, Daniel Chapo won the Mozambique general election with about 70% of the vote. Chapo is the head of FRELIMO, the Marxist-Leninist party of Mozambique's liberation, which fought an internal anti-communist resistance called RENAMO which was backed by Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa; Frelimo won in 1975. However, as the USSR fell, Frelimo began to allow elections inside Mozambique, and has ruled the country with significant majorities in each election ever since.
The main opposition party inside Mozambique is Podemos, which is led by Venancio Mondlane, a former member of Renamo and trained inside the USA. He alleges that his polling figures predicted a majority win for him, not Frelimo, and has accused Chapo of electoral fraud. There have been the usual slogans about how they yearn for freedom. The EU, of course, "witnessed irregularities." As @WilsonWilson@hexbear.net has pointed out, Mozambique has massive undeveloped gas fields and is outsourcing the development process to France, Norway, the UK, and the USA, while mysterious Islamist groups have popped up to cause chaos in the exact regions which have the gas, slowing the process of actually developing those gas fields. Overall, it appears to be a cookie-cutter colour revolution attempt by the imperial core designed to install a comprador for cheaper resources. Its proximity to BRICS+ member South Africa may also be significant, noting the colour revolution in Bangladesh earlier this year exerting influence near India and China.
Protestors have been battling against the police and government since late October, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries as well as massive disruption, as the government has intermittently blocked access to the internet and social media. As of today, calm appears to be returning, with border crossings beginning to reopen.
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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 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.
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.
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Paul "the stenographer of powerful" krugman came around to tariffs
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ou3Cc
Yet another dogshit Krugman article. To summarize in one sentence:
trump bad, trump stupid, china bad, china stupid, china not growing, china failure, trump more stupid than china, trump bad
You can go read the article if you want but I promise you'll just say "Fuck, I should have just kept to the summary." It's article #438742 that says "Here's some advice to China, a country that has rocketed from utter poverty to the second (and really first) largest economy on the planet in less than a century, from a bunch of Western countries that have been in stagnation and depression since 2008." There's nothing of value here.
You forgot "biden good" to put in there
Swivel of economists according to powerful wishes is funny though. They've been crying about tariffs with those funny wall maps since like 1800s. Simple heuristic "eminent producer doesn't want tariffs in the world" or
, which way western economist
globalization really did go from like "This is the TOTALLY UNSTOPPABLE FORCE that will ravage through every economy like a behemoth" in the late 1990s, to "Well, we need to cultivate globalization like a delicate flower in the face of adversary" in the 2000s under Bush, and now to "Actually we never liked free trade, all my homies hate free trade, let's put tariffs and sanctions on everything." The economic ideology of the imperial core is utterly unchangeable, until it isn't (because an alternative formulation benefits the capitalists).
I think its even more storied: for usa its like
(1850s-1930s)
we can't compete for shit, take brits intellectual property and tariffs against brits
(1940s-1990s)
your productive capacity was bombed out, such a shame, open up your markets so we can help you out (different logic with agricultural products in global south, but same)
(2010-)
chinese behave very unfairly, they are taking our ip, behaving very badly and manipulating currency
I don't think he is pro-tariff because it benefits the American economy or whatever but because
What's the functional difference?
Just a different sales pitch
I remember a podcast where Michael Hudson was dunking on Krugman, it was something pretty basic lIRC Krugman was talking about trade deficits as if they’re the only source of currency imbalances between countries i.e. completely ignoring government transactions for example.
yea, all the mainstream economists weirdly seem to avoid the capital account (the sterilization section is mostly BS btw, inflation part in particular).
I'm going to ignore China and the U.S. But if you look at most developing countries currencies (ones not on rigid exchange rates) between 2000-2008, you will see them appreciating quite a bit in spite of large current/trade deficits due to neoliberal reforms allowing foreigners to invest in these countries combined with the bubble that had been created by the US. The Governments back then were worried because the capital inflows were undermining their trade competitiveness and bought up foreign currencies in the international markets (which alleviated it to some extent).