Image is of Iranian missiles flying over the Knesset, the Israeli parliament building in Jerusalem.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Your Wednesday update is here!
Your Friday update is here!
Your Saturday update is here!
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
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.
Arguing with online libs is a pointless exercise and no matter what you'll say they'll never change so get down and dirty with, just always tell them that you are not voting for genocide, no matter their argument say you'll not vote for genocide because lets be real it's a cudgel that'll always hit. They write a paragraph just tell them 'cool story, still not voting for genocide' validating their genocide having opinion by trying to refute them is the wrong play. Just as we wouldn't argue with a nazi we shouldn't argue with them on anything they like genocide, they want genocide and as such you won't vote for genocide, everything else is foolish because they'll never change and so you'll just waste your energy when you could just get them angry.
I think it comes down to whether or not you have an audience. Arguing with libs online is indeed pointless if your goal is to change that one lib's mind. It's just not worth the time or effort when the chance of success is so close to zero as to may as well be zero. But if other people are reading, your odds get better and you might consider there being another potential goal, like planting seeds. If the audience is also mostly comprised of libs, there's at least a possibility that you might be in a good position to get some of them to start questioning the bullshit, especially if some of them are the kind who don't even get exposed to anything else. Saying things that they might think about later can have an effect on observers, VILenin's potential gotcha reasoning in the comment above being a great example.
Most of us here were also libs at one point, and seeing good arguments from communists is part of what radicalized me and others who have said as much in the past. You can use whatever tactics you think best, including just laughing at them or PPB'ing them, because some people are actually swayed when someone who shares their beliefs are taken down a peg by someone else roundly ridiculing them. But I would never say that "refuting them is the wrong play" in that kind of scenario, because good argumentation and good use of rhetoric does influence people especially if they're just on the sidelines observing.
I agree that it's important never to platform a nazi, but I think this is a bit different. The not platforming nazis thing assumes the nazis don't already have the platform, that they're trying to push an agenda that requires more acceptance of what they're saying, acceptance that they don't have yet. In this case, they already have it. Their brushing aside of this genocide is the mainstream position. You're not preventing people from being exposed to their toxicity by simply not engaging them, and talking about their odious position doesn't add to its legitimacy because it has already been legitimized. Also, while I know the true dyed in the wool libs are just as-yet scratched fascists, I still believe the majority of people who think of themselves as liberals do have hearts and minds and can be won over. Having these kinds of arguments and considering good methods of argumentation is not futile, and neither is putting it into practice in places where a good number of lurkers might be reading.
Not really, like if your audience is just debate perverts then debate away but most people aren't debate perverts and are much more receptive to someone saying "Stop doing Genocide" than someone that writes 10 Paragraphs, like the TL:DR thing is real so actually keeping it short and concise is more effective if you can use it, which in this case you absolutely can, like call me anti-intellectual but not everything needs to be examined three times over especially not something as blatantly obvious as 'Genocide bad' it's the same as going 'Nazis bad' almost everyone understands this and they'll agree with you. If they disagree with you on the genocide part then you argue that part and have them deny of defend genocide which puts them in a losing position because again everyone understands that genocide is bad.
Different tactics work on different people. I was swayed from liberalism to communism much more by long form argumentation, stuff I had to read and really think about and examine, before concluding that my liberal beliefs were the garbage they were. Just saying "bad thing bad" to me would have made me roll my eyes and think you didn't have any valid arguments. And to be honest, current me doesn't blame past me for thinking that. Maybe that works on some people, but again, that's why there are different tactics. Yours is no more valid than VILenin's, and were it me on the other side, yours would be less valid than his by far. That's not me calling you anti-intellectual, but neither should you act like using reasoned argumentation is too high brow to influence anyone who isn't already a committed pro-Palestinian communist.
Clearly they don't understand that it's bad enough, seeing as this whole conversation is centered around the "calculus of deciding that a genocide is an acceptable trade-off." Many people who do recognize genocide is bad, still think "well, it's a complicated situation" or they have fallen for the both-sides lie and think that the Palestinians would be genociding Israelis if the zionists weren't doing it first. These are the kinds of lies that would be good to disabuse them of. Which is something we can do in numerous cases, since it has happened, and one effective way of doing that is to used reasoned argumentation with healthy rhetoric. Which is what VILenin was talking about. Coming in and saying "Nah, it's useless" or "that tactic doesn't work, but my short pithy one does" is weird and unhelpful. I'm not sure why you insist on putting down what he came up with.
Sure different tactics work on different people, but there's more people that fall in some categories and more that fall in others, then there's also the fact that long form argumentation is a pretty contested space. Like think of all the lib youtuber, for every good analysis you have 10 Peter Zeihans enforcing lib thought. For every chapotraphouse you have 10 pod save america and so on and so on, and the lib shit is boosted and funded a ton more than the very tame communist/socialist stuff. And I'm sorry to tell you this but having a better argument does not win that space, just being around more does.
This specifc person listens to some lib podcaster or twitch streamer or youtuber that prechewed them the long form argument that did the moral calculus, but that's not most people. There's really not that many people that go 'Well it's a complicated situation' exactly one person in my real life that brought that up and I asked them what's so complicated about genocide, and this person fucking loves long form argumentations because they love to listen to fucking Peter Zeihan and even read his book and likes to pretend they are informed. Most people don't watch some debatelord streamer, or youtuber or CNN 24/7 most people just go about their lives and when you tell the turbo-online lib that you aren't voting for genocide those people will not listen to the long form argumentation on why 'actually genocide is cool' they'll side with you because of course genocide is bad and by the time the other person has twisted themselves into a logic pretzel they'll have made up their mind.
I'm putting this thing down because it's a white room solution, like I don't know if you've met people but if you use words like hitlerian moral calculus you'll have lost people. Shit if you use neoliberalism you'll have lost people, guess what if you use a long form argument you'll end up using words people just don't know about and that's when you lose them, everyone knows genocide, everyone knows genocide is bad, there's really no need for anything longer than that.
There's a reason Lenin campaigned on:
Peace, Land and Bread
it's because it is easy and everyone understands it
I wouldn't even go that far. I would simply say that if you don't live in a swing stage, the presidential election is a sham election not worth wasting time and energy caring about. So the lesser evil nonsense goes out the window because your vote has no real causal effect on what electors get elected anyways, meaning your meaningless vote just becomes a token "I like this dude" mark of approval instead of some impactful action that can be judged on pragmatic grounds.
The vast majority of people living in solid blue/red states recognize this simple truth, which is why voter turnout is so low. Most people who actually do vote for president do so as an incidental vote after voting on various referendums and state/local offices. It's a "well, I'm already here to vote for who gets to be mayor, so might as well expend the 5J of energy to vote for who gets to be president."