I have pondered for a week about how I'm going to cover world events and especially this war in the long term, without losing my mind (and a significant amount of time on my behalf) staring into the abyss that is modern-day journalism.
My solution, so far, is what you can see. The update itself and the summary have performed a fusion dance, becoming a single entity (who even reads thousands of words almost every day just for news?). Only the headlines will be posted, except when a short excerpt from the article is particularly good at summarizing the article's contents (or when the article has a clickbaity headline). To save character space, all links to media will be archived, except for a few special cases like blogs (e.g. Michael Roberts, Naked Capitalism), instead of just the more MSM-y sites.
To the loyal people with attention spans of steel who have been here since the beginning, back when the war looked like it would be over before the first leaves started falling off the trees - yes, I agree, it does look frighteningly similar to what I initially did before the bulletins site was a thing. Just with a different categorization system. Time is a flat circle, after all.
Anyway:
November 21st's update is here on the website and here in the comment section!
November 22nd's update is here on the website and here in the comment section!
November 23rd's update is here on the website and here in the comment section!
November 25th's update is here on the website and here in the comment section!
November 26th's update is here on the website and here in the comment section!
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
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. I recommend their map more than the channel at this point, as an increasing subscriber count has greatly diminished their quality.
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. Beware of chuddery.
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 fairly brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. The Duran, of which he co-hosts, is where the chuddery really begins to spill out.
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 ~ Now rebranded as Battlefield Insights, they do infrequent posts on the conflict.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
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 ~ One of the really big pro-Russian (except when they're being pessismistic, which is often) telegram channels focussing on the war. 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. 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
Any Western media outlet that is even vaguely liberal (and quite a few conservative ones too).
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.
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It's one thing if the protests are localized in a single city or even a single province. But if the protests are happening in multiple cities from multiple different provinces, then this is extremely dangerous and the CPC has to trend very carefully. When there are protests in Beijing, Urumqi, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, you can't pin it on just the local government or a particular province being anti-zero-Covid.
Having said that, this doesn't preclude some CIA bullshit or NED-funded fuckery. So far, none of the protests I've seen are particularly violent, certainly not as violent as the completely compromised Iranian protests where NED-funded goons have been caught stabbing Iranian cops to death and throwing Molotov cocktails at residential buildings.
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The one that call CCP probably NED funded, no one in China use CCP when they calling the party, it usually the CPC. Especially the Shanghai one where it near 500 meters of US consulate, since the CPC itself already relax the zero covid, highly doubt peoples care about Xi when it the central govt already only write the legislation, the local implement it. Time for the CPC to root out whatever they NED have
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But this protest is in Chinese, and they using the CCP. Urumqi is not even fully lock, it’s only partially lock. The overall national directive has been on the reopening side, which is why you see western headline put out “doctor in China warn Xi to not reopen”, or they reduce the quarantine time, prepare to reopen
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When they moving fast, hospital overload and body pile up, are they gonna take blame or the govt take the blame? and since when the Chinese care about English audience, the same one that want to wipe them off or demonize them like the Russian
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Of course there is frustration. Do you think the CPC officials like it when they see the economy tank? Of course not, which is why they tried their best to find middle ground between their health expert and the stability of society, slowly opening up. If they gonna reopen at fast pace, then they have to do blanket on media coverage, and go western route and stop reporting, move the number to the rsv/flu death . So no report = business as usual even with the body pile up behind and millions disable.
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We're on the third years of covid, we already got all the info and data readily available from HK, TW and many western countries. Chinese peoples should be able to understand those, unless they funded by outside actor.
shijiazhuang removed most of the municipal (that is to say, city-sponsored as opposed to health system sponsored, the two are separated for reasons) free covid testing sites in the middle of a big outbreak last week or the week before
idk if they've put them back now but people were PISSED, but news of that didn't really get out bar a few zhihu flame threads. i think chaoyang district did similarly and it was just FUD everywhere, which makes me think that this latest wave of zero covid is due to unpopular sentiment in initial rollout areas, but what do i know
situation is a fucking mess right now lol, damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Yeah even the Shanghai protestors are calling for Xi to step down. I don't particularly agree with Xi choosing to take another term because it hurt mobility in the Communist Party. This will probably lead to relaxing more Covid measurements than anything else. NATO really wants China to end up like the Soviet Union but material conditions really aren't anywhere near as bad in China as they were in the SU during that time.
Has mobility within the CPC decreased? I’m not a China observer but it seemed to me that the top levels at least saw a huge refresh with the recent party congress.
That’s just my anecdotal observation, not an empirical one, but mobility within the CPC is a measurable quantity so that kind of assertion feels like it deserves a quantitative analysis to support it. Eg has the average term of delegates increased or decreased? Average term of cabinet increased or decreased? I’d guess average terms have decreased (hence greater mobility) since Xi brought in many new faces but I could stand to be corrected.
And the periods of greatest stagnation in the USSR was during those periods where coalitions of very old men remained in power, which were a decision to represent various factions in power in a balance of power structure. In theory this keeps everyone at the table but in practice it devolved into stagnant political fiefdoms. The benefit of a powerful leader like Xi is that he’s able to boot out some stale factional leaders.
Of course there’s always a tension between concentration of power in one man vs too many political factions becoming stagnant and stale so ideally it is oscillates between these two, circling some kind of unstable equilibrium, but there’s really no reason to think two terms is a magic number. A third Xi term seems appropriate for him to establish the power of the Marxist wing and setup his lieutenants in some kind of succession plan.
If he had been limited to two terms then the neoliberal wing would have become strong again which was kind of the point of establishing those term limits on the first place. The neoliberal wing put in those term limits since they wanted business leaders to be the long term strategic leaders of China so getting rid of those term limits allows the party and the internal democratic processes of the party to provide long term strategic vision instead.
Probably yes it will oscillate too far towards concentration of power over time since that needle swings back and forth over time but I don’t agree with this idea that term limits are the appropriate response. That’s a very American-centric view.
Recall that US term limits only exist because FDR was doing too much economic populism that the business elites hated, Chinese term limits were introduced by the neoliberal wing of the CPC when it held power, and you mostly see calls for political term limits from neoliberals or libertarians or otherwise business friendly types. Their main function is to limit the power of political processes to therefore give power to economic processes.
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