No update today, apologies. I intended to make one today but then numerous events and happenstances occurred. Tomorrow will be a return to your daily scheduled programming.

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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.

Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.

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.

  • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]M
    ·
    2 years ago

    And on a pettier note, Poland is demanding that Norway sell oil and gas to them on the cheap….because Poland is having a very big hissy! That is not much of an exaggeration.

    Funny but I have yet to see anyone in Europe complain about US energy profiteering, particularly on the LNG it has promised to Europe….or admitting that the reason energy prices have spiked since the war started is not the direct impact on the conflict, which is actually not a very big war by war standards, but the sanctions, which the West did to itself.

    Mind you, that’s only one of the “Things aren’t going the way they are supposed to” stories at the Financial Times tonight. Another is of Saudi Arabia continuing to reject US dictates regarding Russia: Saudi Arabia signals support for Russia’s role in Opec+ as sanctions pressure mounts. The IMF whistles past the graveyard in a global growth forecast that oddly does not mention sanctions blowback or even high energy prices and commodity, erm, sourcing issues. It’s a wee bit too oblique.

    The upside, one supposes, is at least the IMF is not making Russia, oh, Putin, responsible for everything bad happening in the world right now.

    Although there were other sobering stories on the landing page, we’ll round out our Financial Times cheery sightings with Overdue reality check for Fed and markets has barely begun.

    I must admit that I lacked the imagination to foresee that the ripple effects of the crisis could extend to the geopolitical realm, even though the neoliberal economic model depended on globalization to discipline worker wages in advanced economies. The fix to give the appearance of rising living standards was asset price inflation and rising levels of consumer borrowing. That hit its limit when subprime borrowers, on a widespread basis, were engaging in Ponzi finance: getting teaser loans that presumed they could refi attractively due to home price appreciation, and often extracting equity by refi-ing more than the old loan balance (we’re skipping over the derivatives turbocharging for now).

    But how we got where we are, into what we’ve now admitted is a proxy war with Russia (and if you look back to 2014, we’ve worked hard to stymie Russia’s efforts to de-escalate the civil war in Donbass), the US could be argued to have had colossal bad luck in terms of how events played out. Obama’s failure to engage in adequate post-crisis reforms, and then give the banks a second bailout via a “get out of jail nearly free” for mortgage chain of title liability, deepened and extended the damage of the crisis via millions of otherwise preventable foreclosures. That widened inequality, particularly by destroying black wealth. Making the Fed primarily responsible for stimulus, as opposed to having the Federal government focus on increasing productive capacity, made matters worse by inflating asset values and promoting rampant speculation.

    Widening inequality and a very slow recovery contributed to the hemorrhaging of Democratic party representation at all levels of government, resulting in a weak and geriatric bench. It also paved the way for the unanticipated rise of Donald Trump, due to the him having the unexpected break of running against an unappealing Hillary Clinton, who managed to make herself even more so over the campaign.

    Hillary, via her tenure as Secretary of State and her warmongering (recall that Obama checked her worst schemes; she still campaigned on launching a hot war with Russia, coded as a no-fly zone in Syria), was deeply enmeshed with the Blob. Had she not been the candidate, the plan to mix things with Russia might not have been front burner. But we learned when she lost how many college tuitions in the Beltway depended on intensifying that conflict. Recall how the defense-intel state quickly and frontally attacked Trump, with its press stooges suggesting that he should not be President because the military did not support him (openly saying America should run on third world authoritarian lines), then trying to flip electors, then running unfounded RussiaRussia! allegations that went splat when investigated.

    This is a very long digression on how outcomes are path dependent. If Obama hadn’t given Hillary the consolation prize of being Secretary of State, setting her up for another run, we probably would not have wound up at this juncture. America would never give up its hegemony gracefully, but it’s hard to imagine, absent nuclear war (which is not out of the picture) a more ferocious self-immolation.