Here is September 5th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary.

Here is September 6th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary.

Here is September 7th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary.

No updates on Thursdays.

Here is September 9th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary.

Here is September 10th's update!

A few improvements:

  • I'm gonna try and include more images, now that I've figured out how to do it on my end without things getting confusing. Namely, I now have a whole folder on my computer dedicated to this stuff where I can put things. A truly incredible development. However, a lot of the articles don't have images, and if they do, they aren't all that noteworthy - think "typical stock image of an oil barrel or a dude looking frazzled at a stock market screen". But still, there's usually at least 1 or 2 images that I can and should put in every day for added pizazz.

  • I'm actually using the tagging system, instead of it just being "ukraine" and "russia" the whole time, and will be slowly working on adding them for the previous updates too. Eventually, you will be able to search by country throughout the whole update list, from the ever-present "china" or "united states" to the very rare "uzbekistan".

  • More consistent climate and space updates. Hopefully.

  • 100% more love for our trans comrades.

  • Adding what you people post in these megathreads to the summaries too. The tyranny of only referring to my own work without talking about anything of the comments you guys make shall end.

On that note: do you have a lot of knowledge about the current state of a particular country (beyond mindless electorialism)? Do you, for some reason, have a lot of knowledge about hydrogen power, or the fossil fuel industry, or renewables, or rare earth mining, or have you delved into a wikipedia rabbithole on a topic and became a semi-expert? Hell, are you an actual expert? If the answer to any of the above is yes, please comment more! There are like 200 countries on this planet and I realistically only have time to talk about a fraction of them on a given day, and of that fraction, only a single article. I may have a vibe about certain countries, but if you wanna rant about the current situation in X country or how neoliberalism is ruining Y country, but you think "nah, who gives a shit" - I give a shit. Some of the best content in these megathreads is people being like "The general media narrative around what's happening in this country is wrong, here's what's actually going on here."

I'll even quote your username in the summaries if you do it. It's a meritocratic version of the general megathread's username list that they do every time. The thrill of a purple number next to the bell in the upper right corner of your screen can be yours for the low low price of a microessay for our reading pleasure.

Links and Stuff

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Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists, for the "buh Zeleski is a jew?!?!" people.

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.

Telegram Channels

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

Pro-Russian

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.

https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ Gleb Bazov, banned from Twitter, referenced pretty heavily in what remains of pro-Russian Twitter.

https://t.me/asbmil ~ ASB Military News, banned from Twitter.

https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.

https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster - crowd-funded U.S journalist, mostly pro-Russian, works on the ground near warzones to report news and talk to locals.

https://t.me/riafan_everywhere ~ Think it's a government news org or Federal News Agency? Russian language.

https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Front news coverage. Russian langauge.

https://t.me/rybar ~ Russian language.

https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.

https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.

https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense.

https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine

With the entire western media sphere being overwhelming pro-Ukraine already, you shouldn't really need more, but:

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.

Last week's discussion post.

  • SoyViking [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I'm genuinely amazed at how self-destructive western Europe is. I get that the rulers of Europe are insulated from the consequences and can afford to entertain Atlanticist fantasies. Some of them might believe US imperial propaganda and some of them might have been bought off.

    But politicians are not the only people with power. Industrial capital has had lots of sway over public discourse and public policy in Europe. These capitalists are hurting badly now but we still don't see them make any efforts to ease the energy crisis by demanding peace efforts from their respective governments.

    I get why steel smelters and cement producers doesn't care about their governments pursuing imperialist wars in far away places, it doesn't affect their bottom lines. But I don't get why they remain silent about completely avoidable policy decisions that are driving them out of business.

    Do European industrial capital actually gain from the destruction of Europe in some perverse way or are they just as blinded by pure ideology as the politicians?

    • jackmarxist [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      American propaganda is like the biggest and the most intensive propaganda campaign in world history. The way people live in western countries is integrated with that propaganda. The terrifying part is that the same propaganda somehow works for pretty much every type of right winger ideology and also a lot of left wing ones.

      • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Remember when two teams of German economists, doing some simplistic modeling that didn’t factor in the complexity of the real world, presented the case that Germany can totally take a 5% GDP hit to remove itself from Russian energy dependence back in March? (It was such a feel good time for them back then when the Germans were talking about boycotting Russian energy, not the other way round!)

        Remember the good old days of the first gas-for-ruble parry by Russia, and how Europe was essentially staring down the barrel of the gun for a while? Call Russia's bluff, the experts said! He wouldn't actually do it, they said! Well, Europe caved, and then Russia decided to show them that they weren't bluffing anyway, as the corkscrews tightened and the gas being transported fell and fell...

          • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Me, sitting smugly in a city under total siege, just after the enemy force cuts off all food transports into the city: "Those idiots! They just cut off their last piece of leverage to get us to surrender!"

          • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            It’s funny that the libs are now coping by saying things like “Putin’s energy weapon can only be used once! By next year he won’t have the leverage over us anymore!”

            Gee I wonder what weapons might actually only be useful once in this context, I wonder if it might be something like stealing the entire foreign currency reserves of Russia

            :thonk:

    • Lovely_sombrero [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      But politicians are not the only people with power. Industrial capital has had lots of sway over public discourse and public policy in Europe. These capitalists are hurting badly now but we still don’t see them make any efforts to ease the energy crisis by demanding peace efforts from their respective governments.

      EU leaders and CEOs come from the same rotating pool of people. Even more so than in the US, where you at least have more "wings" of capital, who mostly want the same thing, but disagree on some cultural stuff and make that cultural stuff part of their political identity. In the EU, they all realize that they are all part of the same club, even if they disagree on gay marriage or something like that. So they all believe the same. It will take a lot more for some serious resistance to appear and by then it might be too late, even tho a significant change in policy is in their own self interest.

    • trompete [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      In addition to what some of the other people have said (that they are badly advised and believe the war propaganda), another thing is them getting bullied, I think.

      People probably remember the Scholz kinda dragging his feet with the escalations in the beginning. Nord Stream 2 was pursued until it was clear Russia is not just helping out a bit in the Donbass. Heavy weapons were not sent for a while. Since the SPD is 🤝 with industry, this suggest that industrialists were warning him this whole time.

      Problem is that public opinion has been shaped so that even this little bit of feet dragging got him attacked viciously in the press. Meanwhile the hardliners are more popular than ever.

      So the press is bullying them into compliance. Not sure why they can't get the press on their side, but here's some speculation:

      • The US managed a very loyal press after WW2, and still today many important journalists are members of transantlanticist networks.
      • Journalists are the most propagandized people and know fuckall about industry. They also are lazy and copy from the NYT.
      • The press families are not the same people as the industrialist families.
      • The properly big companies have factories in other countries too. These "Mittelstand" guys that are going broke are not really at the same level of influence.