No update today.
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.
This war has led to some really annoying linguistic virtue signalling on both sides. In westoid discourse the invasion is always "unprovoked" and "unjustified" and Crimea is always prefixed with "the illegally annexed peninsula". In Ukraine Russia is not just Russia but "Russia (aggressor country and terrorist)".
Meanwhile in Russian media Meta, the company behind Facebook, is always prefixed with "(banned in the Russian Federation for extremism)"
All of these performative attempts to constantly underline how evil your enemies are and how just your own cause is are excruciatingly tedious and annoying to read, like a written version of a popup ad.
A lot of them border on Homeric Epithets.
Facebook should be banned for extremism, it promotes killing Russians and has enabled multiple genocides
I don't disagree. I just don't need to hear that it's banned in Russia every time it's mentioned.
Well one sides verbal tics correspond to reality (Facebook IS an extremist organization that promotes hate) whereas the other continue to lie off its ass and ignore context (this is not a Russian war of aggression, neither side has labeled it a war and the aggression was done by NATO in the 2014 coup and attacks on Donbas)
Every war is like this. To get people to kill each other for rich men's geopolitical games you have to dehumanize the enemy as absolutely as possible.
The worst part of it is that they are effective propaganda