The war in Sudan has so far been marked by a lot of incompetency and mismanagement by government forces (the SAF). After months of bitter fighting, in late 2023, the opposing Rapid Support Forces suddenly expanded their control towards the southeast of Khartoum after not a lot of resistance, most notably taking the city of Wad Madani. This led the SAF supporters and officials to panic and point fingers at each other about what the hell the army is even doing, while RSF soldiers looted the city.
These victories led to a short period in late December and early January where diplomacy and peace talks were considered, but such attempts fell apart. The leader of the RSF visited various African countries, including meeting Paul Kagame in Rwanda, to boost his legitimacy. Then, the RSF attacked into South Kordofan and consolidated their hold on other areas.
The Sudanese capital of Khartoum sits on a river which divides it from the city to its west, Omdurman (see the post image). The SAF and RSF have been fighting over this grand urban area for the whole war, with the RSF holding most of Khartoum (with an entirely cut-off SAF force holding on in the center), with a similarly cut-off SAF force also in eastern Omdurman, up against the river. For 10 months, this force has been under siege - but no longer. In perhaps the first actual W of the war for the SAF, they finally managed to break the siege a week ago, pouring supplies in. This leaves a section of the RSF now cut off, though Omdurman is still not under full SAF control (and, who knows, the whole situation could once again go badly for the SAF).
Meanwhile, the Sudanese socioeconomic situation has completely collapsed, with potentially a 20% fall in GDP and 8 million people displaced, with 2 million from Khartoum alone. 18 million Sudanese, or about a third of the population, is in acute hunger, and 20 million children are out in school. The refugees streaming out of the country are causing knock-on effects in neighorboring countries like Chad. Nobody is even really counting the dead anymore.
Red is the government forces, the SAF. Blue is the RSF opposition. Other colours are various factions.
The Country of the Week is Sudan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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.
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It’s going to be hard to resist the schadenfreude when the lib ass PMC types have to actually do work. LeArN To CoDe
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It’s never been more reassuring to be in a trade. Everyone said that robots would be doing our jobs and it looks like the people saying that are more likely to have theirs taken
Yeah I listened to a recent Chapo where they had a guest on and were going on and on about how AI doesn’t produce anything original and it’s a bubble and it gets creativity wrong the same way these Silicon Valley people who created it get creativity wrong. And it’ll ultimately fail because it’s not actually thinking and etc etc. And the whole time I’m thinking…the bar for a product is so low for the vast majority of Americans that it doesn’t matter if it’s all derivative and isn’t good. It doesn’t mean it’ll fail, it just means the bar will sink even further, it’ll make people a lot of money, things will generally be worse, and new generations will grow up not knowing the difference anyway. Idk that seems pretty obvious to me but they didn’t even bring that up
Yup the whole point of AI is not to replace the workers, but to push wages down and force the workers to compete with the minimally competent AI so they have to keep up with their productivity while accepting a regression in working rights and conditions.
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Yeah you didn’t miss anything lol
Ed Zitron seems interesting and well informed and i enjoyed his brutal uncompromising dunking i'm just pissed his podcast is in the Roberts Evans-verse. tried listening to it and the one with Evans on was so fucking cringe
I feel like even the most basic email spreadsheet kind of job would be too much for a generative AI model to perform at least in the foreseeable future
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Companies will downsize regardless of an actual development in LLM technology, it is a natural part of capitalist labor cycling. Labor is always your biggest overhead, so firing a bunch of people to slowly rehire people to do the same job worse for cheaper is part and parcel to the business. LLMs will just be the latest excuse used by the boards.
I've said it once and I'll say it again, the problem isn't that you will be replaced, it is that you will be expected to 'keep up' with the technology, regardless of how actually useful it is, which will place a lot of more experienced workers who are too busy dealing with systems as they actually work, under pressure to retrain to use and create the systems as their bosses wished they worked. They have to force the old dogs to learn new tricks, even though the outcomes are the same or worse. Same as it ever was.
adding tablets and wearables and expecting everything to be tracked in multiple databases that don't actually interact
buggy, web based software that isn't reliable in a sanitized work environment
this was my experience in the last year as my retail grocery job decided to introduce all sorts of new tech. stepped down to a simpler dept, kept most of my pay after making waves about how what's the point of introducing stuff like this if it just means we spend half our days managing the software and it's quirks, bugs, and find ways to work around it
In a year or so here I literally will be making my living dealing with these kinds problems. I can assure you that unfortunately they will not be going away, it is probably only going to get worse (which I am basically counting on to make my money). The ideology that "Tech makes things more efficient." among management is incredibly strong, and it would be genuinely funny to watch them muddle about with things they barely understand and never follow up with if it wasn't for the very real human consequences that their baffling decisions create.
the problem isn't that the models can't do math, it's that they can't do facts. like have you ever really tried talking to one? about something you know about?
my friend sent me screenshots of an interaction the other day - he asked the gippity to calculate the revolutions per minute of a car wheel of given dimensions when the car is traveling at 60mph. the model pulled a formula out of somewhere, and showed its work (all correct arithmetic), and got the hilariously wrong answer of something like 45000 rpm. the formula was wrong, missing a critical division. we went looking for it and it probably came from a sketchy, malware-ridden, but high-SEO-ranked calculator website.
the models are inherently unreliable because they don't actually know anything about the world. they output convincing-looking text, but with factual and logical errors. and this isn't something that can just be trained out of them. making a discerning judgment about factual content of a statement - like, it's insane for a car wheel to be spinning at 45k rpm, that can't be right - requires a consciousness that these models don't/won't/can't have. all they're looking at is: given the context I've been provided, what is the next word that is going to look the best?
this is what bit air canada in the ass with their chatbot. it rules gippities out for accounting purposes. I'm not saying there's no application for the tech but, just like blockchain and self-driving and vr, it's going to be way more limited than the people trying to base the entire global economy on it are fantasizing.
of course, since the executive class are largely credulous dipshits, especially about things that save them money and make life worse, there will be a lot economic damage and ruined lives before the fad dies out. and when the fad does die out it's going to take a lot of the tech industry out with it.
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I guess it's only a blind spot if you think that the people that hold these endangered bullshit jobs have revolutionary potential as a class. My understanding of history is that these sorts of lumpen or declassed groups have only been effectively mobilized in anticolonial struggles, not proletarian revolutions generally. Fanon documents how lumpen proles were organized and motivated to participate in the Algerian Revolution, but national liberation presents a different set of incentives from socialist revolution. Marx argued that lumpen proles would make unreliable allies, and I think he was right about that.
Let's assume that there is a large population of bullshit spreadsheet workers, and that all or most of them will certainly be replaced by automation in the near future. If you were to organize a majority of them under a party banner, what power would they have to aid the revolution? If this were to happen after they had all lost their bullshit spreadsheet jobs, they would no longer have any power to disrupt the flow of bullshit spreadsheets. If you were able to convince them right now that their jobs were in mortal danger, would they be able to being society to its knees by withholding their labor? If "the left" were to take power, would this class's knowledge and experience in the field of bullshit spreadsheets be a boon to the project of socialist construction?
I'm searching around for this blind spot, and failing to find it. But I suppose it wouldn't be a blind spot if it were easy to see. Maybe I am misunderstanding what you meant by "the left".
I mean, you would still need clerical workers in a socialist society. Depends on how wide a net you're talking about when you mean bullshit spreadsheet jobs.
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Maybe I'm thinking about it backwards. This potential glut of lumpen office workers could pose a huge danger to the left if they become the "bribed tool of reactionary intrigue".
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If we're thinking about the same jobs, then a lot of them could already be automated with excel macros, better database connections, or better work flows. They could have automated them at least a decade ago. I think this is just the new tech crazy to provide cover for when they do want automate those jobs just like how machine learning was a few years ago. It does have its legitimate uses and will affect jobs but I doubt that all the corporations will truly invest into making their AIs a very productive part of their company. For a lot of them it'll just be something annoying that the workers have to begrudgingly use and work around after some of their coworkers get fired.
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