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.
Problem is she is no longer leader. The amount of respect a title gives people is pretty nuts. There is a strong likelyhood that infighting will start to spread as her new mentor turns out to be an idiot or tyrant.
word is it's hakeem jeffries, who hates progressives more than pelosi ever did, so :pain:
Dems are going to merge with the Reaganite GOP as those types abandon the sinking MAGA ship.
Populist left just won’t exist or will be bullied into supporting the Dems.
Populist right will be fucking insanely racist and reactionary, will probably dominate state elections.
Maybe a populist left can emerge? There might be space for it and it could steal “economic anxiety” votes from the right or even form a coalition with the protectionist right but it would be a hard sell to form a coalition with such intense culture war divides on trans and race issues. Probably an immoral compromise.
:amerikkka:
A populist left can emerge but it will take a sustained degradation of conditions and hard work on the part of people like us.
Gen Z is much more open to radicalization. They don't want to vote for reactionaries or capitalists, they have some vaguely anticapitalist positions, they are trying to unionize extraordinarily difficult-to-unionize workplaces, they just need folks like us to not drop the ball. They need a home and they need theory and they need support. If we don't pick those things up, they'll either burn out or get recuperated. You can see both happening with a subset of millennials already. Degrading conditions and hope for a better world w/ Bernie motivated a good chunk of them. Bernie getting eat fucked radicalized another chunk. That same thing will happen over and over again at different levels of society, we need to be there to increase the number who radicalize, to be the people who critically support an individual's desire to improve the world, but provide a friendly warning that they'll get fucked by liberals and should come hang with us cool people, read theory, organize unions, get in touch with a wide variety of people in your area and organize around what they need, filtering against reaction and liberal recuperation.
In short, join or organize a principled socialist organization and start being allies to local labor and social justice groups while reading theory to ensure you remain socialist. Create a space that's safe for marginalized people and listen to what they need and say. With that base, we can go far to, at minimum, defend ourselves and our communities from the fashy things ahead.
GenZ has potential, but as much as you can get when they are all in the imperial core
Indeed. We're not gonna have a revolution unless we become massively more organized and conditions degrade in a very particular way, and even then it will probably be after multiple catastrophes and bourgeois revolutions.
But we can help oppose the imperial core itself and stake out space for solidarity, as the kibs are coming for us all but by bit. They'll be here to take out houses, our food, our medicine, our employment, chipping away as ever, and we need solidarity to prevent it from ripping us out one at a time.
We're cool? I've never been cool before, wow...
The coolest
They probably hate leftists an equal amount, but Pelosi is smart enough to put that aside to manage her coalition. Jeffries doesn't have that level of competence, and I doubt anyone else coming after her does either.