October 17th's update is here! TLDR? Here's the summary!
October 18th's update is here! TLDR? Here's the summary!
Next update will be next Friday, but I'll be poking around the thread during that time. Next thread will go up on Monday like usual.
Links and Stuff
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.
100%, I don't diss anybody who treats, say, Biden as the personification of current-day America and brushes aside the other people in his admin doing bad things, not because they think that, say, Blinken is an okay person, but because it gets awfully cumbersome to refer to "the Biden administration, as well as all the non-elected people in the American government who would be there regardless of the current president" instead of just "Biden".
But Great Man Theory is an oversimplification of history to the point of propaganda, and we need to be on guard against it, because it affects how we think about strategies in the current day. If Bezos or Zuckerberg or Gates died of heart attacks tomorrow, it wouldn't do anything to reduce our suffering under capitalism. Hell, if every current billionaire died tomorrow and there was no left-wing movement to capitalize (ha!) off that, then things would be basically the same. It's a system, not a group of people (up to a certain point).
I'm reminded of analysis I heard about the French Revolution, where the reason why the revolutionaries kept cutting off people's heads was more about them being unable to really create a fairer system like socialism due to the lack of technological advancement at that point and so they tried to quell the anger of the sans-culottes by essentially offering them blood instead. Of course, now we can create a reasonably prosperous and fair society under socialist principles, but it's possible that a similar situation may again arise - a group, unable to truly conceptualize and believe in an alternative to the current system, simply starts removing the Bad People and pretending that makes up for it.
You could just say "the deep state" but then people look at you weird.
The one conspiracy theory I find most plausible is the one that the deep state actively encourages and promotes insane cranks like the Q people so that any talk about the government doing shady stuff, even if it is well-researched and documented, immediately gets labelled as crazy by normies.