I'm having increasing difficulty maintaining the time and energy to put into these updates, especially after having moved. My earlier rhetoric about doing this until the war ended (or past that) sounds increasingly foolish now that the war won't be won, militarily at least, for many months longer. I'm also returning to academia soon, which will keep me very busy, and also want to get back to reading theory more, as I've had less time for that, and my reading list is building up.
My choices are thus:
a) fully 'hit da bricks' and stop the updates and the megathreads (presumably somebody would take over posting them, at least while the war continued);
b) stop the updates but maintain the megathreads, posting some of the most important pieces (e.g. from MoA, Naked Capitalism, etc) I find in a few times per day;
c) maintain the updates and the megathreads, but prune the updates to the point where I'm essentially just posting headlines. And might mean that I also couldn't post summaries as, well, I'm not really reading the articles (and the difference between the update and the summary would be fairly negligible anyway).
I don't think the first option is necessary, but I also don't know how useful the third option would be to people. Like, this isn't (just) some kind of self-actualization exercise for me to know more about the news, nor a blog really, it's meant to be a resource. But I'm fine with doing just the headlines, it would take like an hour every day which is a time investment I'm comfortable with. The debate I'm having with myself is whether, at that point, if I'm really filling a niche - i.e. if there are better resources if all you want are the important headlines.
So I'm split between b) and c), essentially.
But for now...
Here is November 14th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary!
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.
deleted by creator
USA might be the puppet master pulling Zelensky's strings but the Nazis are the hand up his ass that make his mouth move.
It’s probably the game plan to say both things at once.
Zelenskyy has more credibility with the NAFO chuds, and when you lie to someone that requires credibility. So he’s the useful person to simply say the opposite of reality because his higher credibility will make him more believable.
Also Zelenskyy is more expendable. You can’t easily replace NATO bureaucrats so they must be more cautious in their lying.
I don’t think Zelenskyy is off script here. I think he’s entirely on-script. The puppet masters want to be contradicted by him here because it’s useful for their purposes to have people demand more action and so having them believe Zelenskyy instead of them is totally in their interests.
Like, they would have known within 10 minutes of the first cop arriving on the scene that it was an AA missile but they played the “we think it was Russia”, “ok it was definitely Russian made”, let that play for almost a full day, then “…it was an oopsie no biggie”. So they definitely were playing games to encourage people to believe it was Russia. To get people to demand more action, more weapons, more escalation.
Those games simply continue. Zelenskyy is on script. The right hand speaks to one audience, the left hand speaks to another.
GOOD post
I would like to participate in an explosive evidence recovery operation one day. I think there's this idea that explosions destroy everything completely, but it would really interesting to handle the bits and bobs left over from even fragile melty circuitry, let alone the body of a missile. (I feel like I get a lot from handling physical objects; I've know how four-stroke engines have worked for a while, but actually pulling one apart last Tuesday I feel like I understand it better)
me pulling my motor apart: easy :cool-bean:
me getting ready to re-assemble it looking at a workbench with a pile of gears, shafts, seals, and levers: oh shit, oh fuck :puzzled:
If Zelensky doesn't stop pushing his luck then he'll eventually commit suicide with two bullet wounds to the head, and then put himself in a body bag and throw himself into a river
Im kinda surprised the "suicide device" from the movie "Shooter" isn't an emote here.
CW: Attempted murder, hanging, language