Links and Stuff
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Yesterday's discussion post.
Ugh it's always disheartening to see based people having bad takes.
An old Marxist teacher of mine said this the other day:
Whatever you say about US aggression, this [Ukraine] war goes beyond everything. This goes beyond Vietnam. Sometimes pure evil manifests in history and there's nothing else to say about it, there is nothing to argue about.
Did you just say it goes beyond Vietnam? You are literally one of the smartest most knowledgeable people I've ever met, but this is just nonsensical propaganda.
cf.:
"In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters."
"Over 7.5 million tons of bombs were dropped by the US and its allied nations during the Vietnam War."
War is fucking horrible, but how the hell can you say that 3 months of war in Ukraine goes beyond Vietnam?
:jokah:
That kind of perceptive disconnect with this war really makes me feel like I'm going insane sometimes. There is no relationship between the actual, measured level of death/destruction and people's perception of it. There is no level of hyperbole that is unacceptable. The fucking President called it a genocide and the worst in Europe since WW2 (everyone forgot :yugoslavia: ???) and no one batted an eye. I don't understand what liberals see when they see this war, when they speak about it it's like fan fiction, just a completely different reality from mine. They actually see a couple thousand deaths versus millions and say the former is worse, and manage to say it as if you were the crazy one. And you don't need to go back as far as Vietnam, the Afghanistan war literally ended last year and yet bringing it up is like ancient history somehow. I hate to use the term outside the abuse context, but it really feels like constant gaslighting. An uninterrupted stream of unreality from people in my own life right up through the highest levels of power, influence, and visibility. If I couldn't look at the numbers myself and confirm that I'm not nuts, I don't know how I'd feel.
The elephant in the room is Yemen, with approximately 400,000 deaths and counting, and no talk of sanctioning Saudi or the US.
The genocide in Yemen will be the model for neoliberal response to climate change going forward.
Far from sanctions, they're using this as the model
No talk of sanctioning the Saudi Arabia or the US is a generous assessment of the discourse. I don't think most people know that there is anything going on there, if they even know of the place at all; they sure as hell don't know we're currently helping invade, blockade, and starve a whole country.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen... there really are quite a lot of elephants.
I don’t understand what liberals see when they see this war
They think white, "civilized" people shouldn't be fighting like this. Neoliberalism (they think) brings peace and stability to the world. White folks fighting challenges this notion that the white people who have accepted neoliberalism aren't actually better than anyone else.
Yes! This is exactly why I commented here. I am grateful for this place. Whenever I wander into liberal spaces I feel like they are from a parallel universe.
And yet... the factual truth is that 70000 civilians died in the Afghanistan War (at least) , and cca 3000 civilians died in Ukraine. Both figures are from mainstream sources, but suddenly you are a tankie if you'd tried to suggest that there were worse wars in the past 10 years. More than twenty times the civilian casualties. All for a war that haven't achieved any political objectives apart from making the Military-Industrial Complex richer.
It's their manufactured reality that would shatter if they were actually consistent in calling out war crimes.
Sometimes pure evil manifests in history and there’s nothing else to say about it, there is nothing to argue about.
How the fuck can you be a fucking Marxist and know about an analytical tool as powerful as historical materialism and then go "I dunno sometimes pure evil just happen for no reason I guess"?
Exactly what makes me so confused. He usually has much more nuanced takes. I had to read it twice, because this kind of shitlib take is completely out of character.
He teaches Althusser and Badiou btw
Nah. Week 2 of the war I decided not to engage in debates about the conflict, especially with people who see this as some kind of Good vs Evil war like we are living in Narnia. Maybe after the war some people will be more willing to take an historical perspective, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
I am just flabbergasted that even Marxist professors are prone to this.
Old age and propoganda get even the best of us. Especially if there is no material incentive not to believe it, and every material incentive to.
How disgusting and eurocentric. Racist old fuck deserves having his nose rubbed in a pile of agent-orange covered dogshit for such an opinion.
Don't forget all that agent orange, which still causes birth defects today
Also don't forget all of the unexploded ordinance that litters the countries america bombed just for funsies, that still kills dozens of people every year to this day
In Laos alone the yearly average death toll is around 50 people, usually mostly children and farmers
Plus many high-explosives and rocket propellents are toxic all by themselves, or decay in to toxic substances.
I’m always fascinated by the notion of “pure” evil. What does that “pure” mean? Like what is pure evil uncontaminated by, in contrast to regular evil?
This goes beyond Vietnam
i literally cannot stop thinking about this. how can you put so little thought into a statement
Lot's of people have dogshit takes and blind spots. Kill your heroes.
No. This is not the whole paragraph. He is writing about Russian war crimes.
Made me think of this anecdote about Tony Blair and the Iraq war
https://youtu.be/25aYrfvOGUs?t=1055
These updates have been really good for finally burning away the last of any brainworms I had about the media's truthfulness and legitimacy, particularly the stuff I put in Dipshittery and Cope. The fog of war has re-shrouded itself now that Mariupol has wrapped up and the main hyperfocus of the western media, the Kiev front, has long since relocated - and I think due to Ukraine's propensity to twist events and massively exaggerate and make shit up for various reasons, that no news is bad news, at least along these fronts. The alternate reality that the media has constructed with this relative lack of information is becoming truly breathtaking.
Of course, the endless repetition of points about Russian incompetency or Ukrainian bravery or Putin's sanity is designed to hammer home this alternate reality, and set up a situation where there is nothing Russia could do where they would be seen as having won the war, in the media's eyes. There's an article to that exact effect, saying how even if Ukraine loses territory (not sure why they'd suggest that, when Ukraine is winning so hard to them), they'd still probably be winners.
It's one thing, for me at least, to read about manufacturing consent or inventing reality in, say, the coups in Central America, and another to have your eyes sealed open as you watch it happening in real time.
But a bloomer I remain, and I have hope that the material reality that has always existed will come back into the fore, as European citizens slowly realize that their governments have sanctioned and declared war on them as much, if not more so, than they have on Russia. It might still be decades before we see real change in that regard, and perhaps we have to go through a phase of far-right wing governance and rhetoric, but fascism is unsustainable, and communism will win.
The alternate reality that the media has constructed with this relative lack of information is becoming truly breathtaking.
It's truly unreal and causes me to experience dissociation. The re-writing of recent history and gaslighting is at insanity inducing levels. I still glance at the "news" every day because I'm curious what my liberal friends and family are being exposed to. But, there is no possible way to counter any of it without being :pepe-silvia:
I opened a front page :reddit-logo: thread last night, sorted by controversial and NATO bootlickers have their list of talking points nailed. I talked to a couple of family members during the first week and explained how NATO and the US was responsible for this conflict, I regret it. They have a seemingly unbreakable trust in the NPR/NYT narratives.
These media sources lead one from point A: this is information that is correct and smart, gathered by smart people who are better than you/ you are a good and successful person for using these sources to point B: op eds explaining how some people (uneducated, poor, probably racist) succumb to the mindless hysterical pitfalls of countering western liberal media and how they are paid and controlled by anti-democracy genocidal authoritarians who wage information wars on you and your children, eat their pets, fantasize about nuking babies etc.
anyway, thanks for all your hard work, I hope you are taking care of yourself and getting some nice weather wherever you are.
Even leftists. Western leftists telling Western leftists they need to "listen to Eastern lefitsts" while cherry picking hard exactly which Eastern leftists they "listen to" (and often even clipping the convenient bits of what they say) is out of this fucking world.
I've pretty much stopped discussing this shit in leftist Discord servers (including "Dirtbag HQ"). The propagandized and ad-hominem-laden dogpiling is intense. Thank goodness this seems to be a mostly online phenomenon.
While I'm maybe not quite as positive about Russian accounts of progress as you (mostly I think they've taken heavier losses, and they were trying initially for a decapitation strike in Kiev as a secondary objective, one that very nearly succeeded), we're broadly in agreement.
The recent Russian advances in areas so fortified that they make the Verdun Salient look undefended indicate that Ukrainian forces are finally falling apart despite putting up a better fight than I frankly expected, something they probably would have done weeks ago if not for throwing 14-year-old boys and old men with 60-year-old western equipment into battle and every US spysat pointing out Russian troop movements in real time for them.
Let’s just hope the fascists don’t exterminate us all when they inevitably take power
one day when we're the biggest forum in the world, remember to keep bullying the fucking libs
Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said Sunday that the goal in the ongoing Ukraine war should be to "take out" Vladimir Putin, contending that there is "no off-ramp" with the Russian president remaining in power.
On March 3, shorty after Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Graham first floated the idea of assassinating Putin during an interview with Fox News. The GOP senator put the idea forward on Twitter shortly later as well. "Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?" Graham asked at the time.
Really hoping the monkey's paw curls for him and Putin is assassinated, but by communists in a revolution
The nuke thing is so exhausting. We spent fifty fucking years living under the sword of damocles and now all these Cold Warriors are champing at the bit to invite in nuclear annihilation. I just wanna grill for fucks sake.
When everything is radioactive, we'll always be grilling.
:grillman:
🎶Oh we will all fry together when we fry.🎶
🎶We'll be french fried potatoes by and by.🎶
🎶There will be no more misery🎶
🎶When the world is our rotisserie,🎶
🎶Yes, we will all fry together when we fry.🎶
Putin's no slouch when it comes to assassinations, either. If they open that box they'd better watch their fucking backs.
Really hoping the monkey’s paw curls for him and
PutinLindsey Graham is assassinated, but by communists ina revolutionMinecraftThey actually think a nice, pliable, Yeltsin-like neoliberal will replace Putin if he is assassinated by the west? Putin is a moderate by Russian standards when it comes to the relationship with the west.
By Multipolarista: Argentina will attend BRICS summits, at China’s invitation, in step toward ‘formal entry’
China has invited Argentina to attend the 2022 summits of the BRICS, a loose economic bloc bringing together Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Chinese President Xi Jinping personally sent a special invitation to Argentina to attend the BRICS summits, and Buenos Aires accepted Beijing’s offer. Argentina’s ambassador to China, Sabino Vaca Narvaja, said the invitation “is extremely important,” and constitutes a step toward “formal entry” into the BRICS. If Argentina joins, the grouping may be renamed BRICSA.
...
At the heart of the BRICS is the New Development Bank, an alternative to the World Bank, as well as the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, a rival to the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF). BRICS members have already said they would support Argentina joining the bloc’s New Development Bank. Argentina is trapped in $44.5 billion of odious debt from the IMF, and has sought other financial opportunities to ease this crushing burden.
This February, Argentine President Alberto Fernández took a historic trip to China and Russia In his meeting with President Xi, Fernández said he wants his country to join the BRICS. “I’m certain Argentina has to stop being so dependent on the [International Monetary] Fund and the United States, and has to open up to other places, and that is where it seems to me that Russia has a very important place,” Fernández said in Moscow. During his visit to Beijing, Fernández signed an agreement officially incorporating Argentina into China’s global Belt and Road Initiative. The foreign policy of Argentina’s centrist government, led by Alberto Fernández, is full of contradictions. While trying to strengthen its relations with China, and to a lesser extent Russia, Argentina has also been careful not to upset the United States.
...
The rise of far-right presidents Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India, both of whom are very supportive of the United States, has weakened the BRICS framework since it was founded in 2009. But Brazil’s left-wing leader Lula da Silva, a former president and co-founder of the BRICS, has vowed to strengthen the bloc if he wins the October 2022 elections. Polls show him consistently ahead against Bolsonaro. Lula’s former foreign minister, Celso Amorim, has said that a Brazil under Lula’s leadership would strongly support Argentina joining the BRICS, calling it “very important” for the region.
I quite like "CRABSI" myself. :sicko-crab:
if they added Argentina, Nicaragua, Laos, Uruguay, and Thailand, they could be LUBRICANTS
Lauesen's credentials are as good as you can get in Scandinavia. He was a member of the Maoist-inspired Blekingegade group and in 1991 he and six others were convicted of a series of robberies to fund the PFLP. During their last heist shots fired from the escape car killed a cop but since the prosecution failed to prove an intent to kill, thereby making it impossible to convict anyone as accessories to murder, and since none of the defendants ratted the guy who fired the shot out, nobody was convicted of killing the cop.
I am incredibly shocked to learn that Blekingegadebanden were maoists. I did know that they were robbing banks to fund the PFLP, which was good. Extremely funny though, that the guy who defended them in their high profile court case, and awoke the anger of every chud in the country, has now been the Chief Justice of Denmark's Supreme Court for the last 10-ish years. Their court case is also almost a textbook example of how to do Criminal Defense when your client is extremely guilty.
America’s New QUICKSINK Bomb Targets China’s Vast Low-Tech Navy
Literally strapping "inexpensive" laser guide systems to "inexpensive" jdams so that some kind of "inexpensive" weapons deploying platform can sink the big beautiful Chinese boaters.
Also side note, why is the fucking U.S coastguard in the Pacific ocean near China, instead of I don't know... GUARDING THE FUCKING COAST OF AMERICA
They never specified which coast they guard, only that they're American.
America’s new QUICKSINK bomb, a fast-moving Joint Capability Technology Demonstration, is ready to target China’s vast armada of aggressive civilian and lightly-armed military craft.
Masks off preparing to murder civilians in the most cost effective way possible.
The great thing about this is that China, as far as I know, hasn't made any military threats of any kind towards America. The only thing they're doing is winning at market economics, and that alone is enough to declare world war III.
You've got to hand it to the yanquis, quicksink is a really good name for an anti-ship weapon.
Sounds like a name of a product being sold on one of the late night infomercials
Is it not? The Pentagon gets all kinds of glossy magazines and big budget presentations from the MIC.
It feels wrong that it's spelled correctly, my brain expects it to be something like
Kinetic Warfare Interceptor for Kill-Solutions on Inhabited Naval Craft
The way WSJ frames the popes criticism of NATO is nothing short of rage inducing
Link? There's few things American protestants hate more than the Pope.
Love that the first lady is doing photo ops in Ukraine, along with Angelina Jolie and Bono. Bono even doing a hour long concert. Really drives home the point that the bloodthirsty and genocidal Russian regime is just indiscriminately destroying the country
Every career virtue signaler has to take a turn kissing the Zelenskyy ring
kissing the Zelenskyy ring
Ah, the new neoliberal (flaring up with the neocon too) goon of a president who "you can sit down and have a beer with".
So apparently Zelensky begging to Portugal a couple weeks back resulted in drum roll.
They are dumping more WW2 museum pieces lol.
M114 artillery with 15km range developed in 1940. I don't know if based or brainworms. If I wanted to help someone die faster during a war this is exactly the kind of equipment I'd send, perhaps only second to 18th century muskets and knifes lol.
US DOD to donate 2000 bayonets last used in the civil war - Russia is definitely finished now!
Mr Zelensky sir, I assure you, these are the finest halberds in our arsenal
anprim libs giving him a pile of rocks and telling him to return to monke :monke-rage:
Zelenzky made a 15 minute propaganda video , saying, among other things, that the Russians are the real nazis.
Did he always talk like a 90's action movie star or is that a recent development?
I really dislike how liberal propaganda focuses on property damage as if it's an indicator of human lives lost.
A destroyed building tells us nothing. People used to live there sure, but what was in it when it was hit? This is what matters. If your Azov goons were in it when it got hit I absolutely do not give a fuck.
was just about to post this.
We will overcome everything. We know this for sure, because our military and all our people are descendants of those who overcame Nazism. So we will win again. And there will be peace again. Finally again!
weird to see this new anti-fascist heel turn
Well whichever sides tearing down references to the Victory of the Soviet peoples over fascism definitely should be opposed so I agree with him on the institutionalization of anti-fascism.
The problem is that if nazis control education they will ""educate"" people that fascism is when ebil-authoritarian-communists.
The liberals in the west are already doing this with the online ""anarchists"" at this very moment. There is a concerted effort to turn the definition of fascism into "authoritarian states" and turn those that would become radical leftists into anti-authoritarians that can then be rediverted towards opposing those that want to overthrow the state. This neatly ties into a ribbon when you label all your enemies as not-democracy and evil authoritarianism.
The left needs to engage in a concerted effort to educate people on what fascism actually is.
This is some next level double speak. If you have even a slight grasp of UA's current Nazi situation the whole thing sounds backwards. It sounds like Zelenskyy is calling for the Russians to liberate Ukraine from the Nazis that took over in 2014.
really is bizarre to see a man talk so much about hating nazis but with the other side of his face also disparages the people that defeated them, the communists
The media here has learned a new technique for delivering news that are not politically convenient. "Russia has claimed that [obviously false thing], [inconvenient true thing], and [obviously false thing]"
Reminds me of those lists of conspiracies put out by the media occasionally that mix in things that are obviously bogus with things that are like, either the argument is purposefully made absurd to deflect further criticism (GMOs probably don't cause turbocancer or anything but Monsanto is a piece of shit company; 9/11 wasn't caused by Bush but there may have been some kind of advanced knowledge, and regardless, they then specifically didn't go after the Saudis afterwards and instead invaded a country which had nothing to do with it), or the story given to us is almost certainly false (Epstein killed himself, JFK was killed by a lone gunman and nothing else)
Yeah the conspiracy op has been around and is a frustratingly effective tactic which I'm sure most of us have fallen for at times... pizzagate: :epstein: gay frogs:alex-no-supplements: :actual environmental destruction, climate change in the 80's and 90's being portrayed as crazy fringe conspiracy, like oh you think tHe GoveRnManT is spying on us I bet you also talk to aliens in your faraday cage lol
I used to have friends who would mock me "the government maaaaan, the corporations maaaaaan"
It's really depressing seeing how much energy is going into simply restructuring where all the fossil fuels are coming from and how they are managed and paid for. Imagine if all that energy were going into green infrastructure and preservation instead.
It's also depressing (but also a little funny) that this whole time, the left has been like "We've gotta switch from fossil fuels to renewables/nuclear! Like, right now! Not in 2050, this needs to be an economic mobilization unlike anything we've yet seen in human history!" for like, at least the last couple decades if not longer, and everybody else has just been like "Haha, silly lefties, catastrophizing everything. The free market will surely work out in the long term and capitalism, meritocracy, and technocracy will save us."
And now we're in a situation where if most of Europe was already on renewable/nuclear energy, this entire crisis would be significantly less troublesome for Europe. It wouldn't be nothing, as you need natural gas for fertilizers and such, but it wouldn't have to be like, instant fucking recession or energy rationing or anything.
ngl it's also pretty depressing that these calls and movements to switch to renewables/nuclear, which are intensifying (albeit still not being taken especially seriously), aren't because people saw the increasingly dying world around them, but because we needed to save a bunch of Nazis in Ukraine rather than have a diplomatic solution with Russia that honestly wouldn't have been that hard to make if NATO just said "Okay, fine, we don't need literally every single country in Europe on our side, you can have Ukraine, we'll have the rest" and Ukraine just stopped bombarding the Donbass. Obviously it's more complicated than that due to the history and western imperialist and capitalist motivations etc etc but on a surface level, peace was actually fairly achievable.
fifth consecutive day of opening the map instead of the update
