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.
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.
🇨🇿😁 In the shops of Prague began to hang signs "Ukrainians are not allowed to enter."
Vendors and managers say they are fed up with the constant theft and appalling behavior of the refugees.
Nature is healing! Westoids are becoming revoltingly racist to refugees again.
"No, I haven't given the Ukrainian refugees significant economic support in my country. What does that have to do with them needing to steal to not starve to death? You moron, haven't you measured the Ukrainian skull shape?"
Ukrainians are gonna become the new Romani people :deeper-sadness:
Putin says he’s raising the minimum wage and pensions in Russia by 10% to counter inflation
Putin does more for the people than my free liberal-democratic GoodCountry government does.
:doomer:
in autocracy you cant change the leader but he can change the policy , in democracy you can change the Leaders but they cannot change policy...
thought the soviet union failed because they cared about people too much
I doubt he actually thinks that, it's just a convenient propaganda line. Anyone can tell that the USSR failed because Gorbachev actively flushed it down the toilet.
:shrug-outta-hecks: It's also possible that Putin is a dumbass idiot and actually thinks that if the USSR was just meaner to its civilians it would still be here.
Putin doesn't strike me as a dumbass though. He's not a nice person who believes in good stuff but he comes off as intelligent and perceptive.
All you have to do is see reality for what it is. That's all you have to do.
Putin saw what NATO was doing, took the chance, and very likely saw that Europe was dependent on Russia despite all the rhetoric otherwise.
US media just prints stories saying "Putin is dying of cancer and a bad man" because if they don't get a supervillain origin story then they might have to contend with reality for once in their lives.
Just look at the pushback against Mr Realpolitik himself, Henry Kissinger, when he said a more stable world is one where Ukraine just cedes some territory in exchange for peace.
People go nuts because "bad guys" are supposed to be punished. There's supposed to be consequences but the reality is that wielding power means there are no consequences, and Russia wields more power than the West would like to realise.
Say what you will about him, but the man is obviously competent.
Russia and China reportedly veto'd increased sanctions on the DPRK in the UN Security Council.
:sicko-wholesome:
they are trying to put more sanctions on north korea while it's struggling with a huge covid outbreak. I have no words...
"As of today, the aggressor conducts intensified fire along the whole line of contact and the positions of our forces in the Donetsk operational region. The enemy uses tactical rocket systems, aviation and artillery," Hanna Maliar [Ukraine's deputy defence minister] says.
"The situation is difficult and there are signs of escalation. The enemy has used all resources to capture our territory and surround our forces. The fighting has reached maximum intensity. The enemy attacks our positions at different points simultaneously. We are in for a very difficult and long stage of the struggle."
sounds like they're really moving now.
Weird. They were supposed to have run out of tanks, missiles, troops, fuel and food several times by now.
There is a series of fresh blog posts going around, by a woman who survived Mariupol. She says she kept a diary, so there is a lot of very interesting details in those posts. It's a long read as they say, and there's no TL;DR, but this is the first first-hand account of this sort I've seen so far. It's in Russian but her prose is very terse and plain, very Google Translatable, so I'm leaving the links to machine-translated English version of her stuff below, if anyone's interested:
How it all began
How it all began (part 2)
Part 3
Part 4
About cell towers and electricity
Part 5
EvacuationI guess this is worth it's own post, I'll make one (OFC with credits and yadda =)
It’s very telling in what ways the right hates Soros. Their biggest attacks on Soros are never some vague funding of social liberal projects, or even on the fact that he’s a billionaire ghoul. It’s always about him as a teenager not doing anything about fucking soldiers. Objectively, what he did in 1944-45 wasn’t immoral. If he tried to prevent soldiers from confiscating Jewish property, he would have been killed, and nothing else would have occurred. They don’t like him because he lived through the Holocaust instead of dying. It’s why they focus on Soros over Musk, as both are very evil men.
You shouldn’t need to qualify hating an imperialist billionaire with “I’m not a fascist”
It’s only sus if you like certain other billionaires but hate Soros specifically, and only Soros
I've listened to a few episodes over the last couple years, but I really need to get through Citations Needed so I can really see all the bullshit the media throws at me now that I've installed my brain into the mainframe, and I can just be like "When this douchebag journalist says this, he's being manipulative, Citations Needed discusses it in this episode". Maybe even have one of those copspeak things like "Uhh, the suspect is committing a 417-alpha-charlie violation, responding with immediate kinetic force" but with episode numbers.
I am eternally grateful to them for having transcripts. (I've never actually heard their voices.) Favorite internationalish episodes:
https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-70-laundering-imperial-sociopathy-through-anodyne-foreign-policy-speak-part-i-f2e123087de7
https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-106-the-sanitization-of-sanctions-56f976af6019
https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-137-thought-terminating-enemy-epithets-part-i-f45b1d91bcf4
https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-138-thought-terminating-enemy-epithets-part-ii-dea4bfcda8c7
I feel like I hear the bullshit quickly since i get angry and start talking over the news or just turn it off and correct them. Citations needed certainly helped make me this way.
stupid putin, raising wages to counter inflation. doesn't he know that money should be going to prop up wealthy investors and asset hoarders instead!
So I heard that mountain dew was origionally made to be a mixer with whiskey, and so I bought one to try it out with some Pendleton's Rye.
It's surprisingly good. like a whiskey orange but a bit different. I guess it's a good poor fella's mixer.
I’m trying that this weekend. Another weirdly good whiskey drink: laphroaig (or some other very peaty scotch) and Pepsi max.
oh Scottish armpit juice, it's been a few years since I had some. I'll have to try that with the max since it sounds weird enough to be good
Almost every soda mixes well with whiskey. Seltzers, coke, mountain dew, sprite, ginger ale, etc.
I haven't tried quinine tonic yet, that might be the one miss for whiskey
A significant part of European industry relies on ultra-cheap energy from Russia, super-cheap Chinese labor and highly subsidized semiconductors from Taiwan. Europe knew about these risks, but showed greed,” Vestager said.
The worst person you know said something true.
And what are they going to do about it then? Let's read some more...
According to the commissioner, European states cannot simply accept such dependencies as part of the deal. “Europe must diversify its trade and accept higher prices … Consumers would ultimately have to pay for these changes,” she said.
Oh... now we know her again. Common people will have to pay so the bougies' rate of profit can be maintained. Pensioners will have to freeze in the winter so the supply of champagne to the yachts in Monaco isn't disturbed.
Oh, okay, so you think that these poor millionaires and billionaires with their globally declining rate of profit shouldn't have their losses made up for? Were you aware of how many risks they make and how hard they work to deserve their free time picking their teeth with the vertebrae of the homeless?
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy angrily denounced suggestions that Ukraine should cede control of territory to Russia in order to reach a peace agreement, comparing such a move with the appeasement of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Now we're at the Hitler comparisons, reading this gives me mental images from Downfall of Hitler issuing orders to non-existing armies in order to achieve final victory.
I'm guessing Zelenskyy is running on a similar chemical regimen.
So what happened to the riots in Sri Lanka? Complete radio silence since Rajapaksa resigned.
the new PM is doubling down on IMF bullshit and i saw recently they hired some evil london-based legal firm to restructure their debt so that's probably why there's radio silence rn
hopefully the people of sri lanka have enough fuel to burn down some more mansions
I've heard absolutely nothing about them since the new PM came in. He's doing some changes and stuff but fuel prices have also gone up since then so I'm not sure if they're just giving him a chance or if they've been cowed by the military or what. Would be very helpful to have more non-western comrades so they can tell us what's going on e.g. in Columbo.
Rajapaksa's resignation is presented as the result of the riots, so if that's the case it'd make sense that they'd die down and ppl would wait for some results from the new powers that be.
There was news today in the Russian media that "Russia received an appeal from Sri Lanka for help in overcoming the energy crisis" but no details at all besides that
I’m wondering if this is less about troops for Ukraine, and more about a jobs program for the 40+ age bracket.
Probably, considering the Russians still have hundreds of thousands of undeployed troops.
And also considering that a large amount of the troop losses being reported as Russian aren't actually Russian, they're from the Donbass militia.
Lots of libs going mask off after Kissinger's comments about returning to the status quo in Ukraine. They clearly don't care about an end to the war, or about the well-being and safety of the people in Crimea or the Donbas republics. What they want is unimportant, what matters is that they "rightfully belong" to Ukraine. Pure ideology.
How do they expect the people in crimea would be treated if they were forced back under the ukrainian state after willingly seceding to a russia? We're lucky that ukraine won't be in a position to make demands like that.
A lot of Succdems and demsuccs played the troll game of “If you side with Henry Kissenger you’re a bad person” as if politics is a fucking football Match. Henry Kissenger just loves imperialism simple as that
Henry Kissinger is evil, not stupid. Just because someone is evil doesn't mean they can't make a rational analysis of the world.
loads of liberals finally have a reason to hate kissinger after years of hearing leftists wish for his death and scolding us for being uncivil