Due to American cluster bombing campaigns advised by Kissinger during the Vietnam War to damage supply lines, over 2 million tonnes of ordinance were dropped on Laos over about a decade, averaging a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes. Laos is thus the most bombed country on the planet up to this point. 80 million bombs failed to explode - the cleanup operation is expected to take centuries, and 25,000 people have been killed and injured by bombs in the last 50 years. About 50 people are killed or injured every year to this day.
After the United States withdrew from Laos, the Pathet Lao took power and abolished the monarchy. Kaysone Phomvihane became a dominant figure in Laotian politics, keeping the course on Marxism-Leninism and implementing the first Five Year Plan in 1981. The second Five Year Plan in 1986 was modelled on Lenin's NEP, and this doubled rice production and significantly increased sugar production. After the fall of the USSR, Laos allowed a small capitalist class to exist, with similar control over them as in China. Laos maintains a 48-hour work week with paid sick leave, vacation time, and maternity leave, and workers are well-represented in trade unions. They faired relatively well during coronavirus from a social standpoint due to quick and efficient action to lock down the country, experiencing ~750 deaths out of a population of over 7 million.
There is hope even after utter destruction by genocidal oppressors.
The weekly update is here on the website.
Your Tuesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Wednesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Thursday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Friday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
The Country of the Week is Laos! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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 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.
AAAB
Assigned Agender At Bavaria
Am I correct in assuming that the German verb "gendern" has a different meaning than the English verb "to gender" and that this ban is explicitly transphobic and will not affect how cis students have always been gendered?
This ban basically means that they aren't allowed to use gender neutral terms in schools and state offices. So because in German literally everything is gendered and things like job titles and such things are almost always using the male gendered terms there have been efforts to make language more inclusive.
Like for example the German word for teacher is Lehrer, which is the male gendered form of the word(Lehrerin being the female one). So to make it more inclusive/neutral there are a few forms like for example writing it with a so called gender star like this: Lehrer*In or using neutral terms like Lehrpersonal(Teaching staff).
But conservatives think this is destroying the German language, so we get debates and bans around such things here.
Sorry if this makes no sense, somehow this is super hard to describe in English.
That makes a lot of sense. So it is not primarily a transphobic thing but more like a misogynist thing?
Conservatism has so many nuances!
they just want to replace gender with an affirmation of support for Israel
every pronoun is just a pointless part of a sentence where you’re not saying you support Israel, which is antisemitism jawohl
Ok, I'm certainly no expert on this, so take this history/opinion, I'm going to present, with a grain of salt.
I will first note that this has become a culture war issue, and that the reason they want to make this into law, is to score points with the anti-woke crowd. So it's just reactionary populist bullshit.
In German, there are three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neutral (articles: der, die, das).
Most nouns have a roughly equal and seemingly random distribution of those genders. Der Fluss (river), die Insel (island), das Meer (ocean).
There is a glaring exception to this: When you turn a verb into a noun, designating "a person who does that", you append -er and the result is masculine: fahren (to drive) → der Fahrer (driver). BUT you can turn that into a feminine form by appending -in: die Fahrerin (female driver).
In common usage, the masculine form is used whenever the driver is male or the driver is of unspecified gender. Also the masculine plural is usually used when talking about a group of people of mixed genders. Feminists, decades ago, started pointing out that this seems rather to assume that the default is male (think for example about man/woman in English, where man is often used meaning "human"), and also that this might subconsciously reinforce gender stereotypes. Importantly, a lot of job titles fit into this category. An electrician is "der Elektriker", possibly reinforcing the idea that electrician is a job for men in people's minds.
So some feminists set out to make the language more inclusive to women. The first that gained traction, mostly in certain parts of academic, feminist, left and left-liberal publications, was the Binnen-I ("FahrerIn", with a capital I), a stand in for "Fahrer oder Fahrerin" (male or female driver). Because this was deemed non-inclusive to non-binary people, this got pushed out by the supposedly more inclusive "Fahrer*in". The * is supposed to designate other genders, like a sort of wildcard character. Nowadays, you more often see Fahrer:in, which looks better and is apparently better for screen readers on computers, which I've heard insert a little pause there. People who take this very seriously will also insert a little pause where the : is when speaking.
These proposals for more inclusive language are not the only ones in existence btw, just the ones that gained some limited mainstream traction. For example, I had a professor who used "die Programmiererin" (the programmer, feminine form) and the pronoun "sie" (she) for a generic programmer of unspecified gender.
Unfortunately, this ":in" or ":innen" suffix does not address all the issues. There are nouns that have more complex feminine forms than just appending -in. For example, physician is "Arzt", the feminine version is "Ärztin", so "Ärzt:in" or "Arzt:in" looks weird, so you got to go "Arzt oder Ärztin". Even more annoyingly, German doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun like "they", which results in a lot of "er/sie" (he/she). There are more problems like that which I can't recall off the top of my head right now. The result is that this so-called "gendered" writing sometimes creates a lot of added complexity. I'll note that even in most common situations the result is longer and slightly more complex. AFAIK linguists have also complained that applying this consistently is not totally possible.
My opinion: I think this is dead in the water. The extra complexity, inconsistency (think about grading an inconsistent ruleset) and institutional opposition means this has no chance of ever becoming mainstream. I know people vehemently in favor of these proposals for more inclusive language, who themselves do not use it consistently (or even most of the time) when speaking. If even the true believers struggle this much with it, there's no chance this will ever go mainstream. I will also add that the argument that "this is meant to be inclusive to nonbinary people, trust us" is basically the same argument used by the status-quo defenders, who say "this is meant to include women".
Edit: Oh, and this is also important: The extra complexity almost certainly causes issues for people with limited reading comprehension, like immigrants, since the result is more complex and harder to decipher. Language courses are also unlikely to teach any of this, since it's unofficial. There's certainly an argument to be made that doing something that hurts vulnerable groups isn't very compatible with the goal of inclusiveness.