Credit to @ThomasMuentzner for the title idea. No, the goddamn city still hasn't been taken, though excitingly, the Russians have moved like three residential blocks up!
December 12th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
December 13th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
December 14th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
December 16th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
I feel pretty ill today so I'm taking the weekend off. Might post some articles here and there.
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.
I'm just looking forward to the WW1 style temporary armistace where the Russians and Ukrainians call a ceasefire in order to play Pokemon Go together on christmas day.
December 25th. 9:36 am. The outskirts of Bakhmut. Russia has been blasting away with artillery at Ukrainian positions since 6 in the morning. Russia's advance resembles an asymptote; a Zeno's Paradox, where every day they advance half the distance of the day before. Yesterday they advanced 10 feet. Today it'll be five. Everybody's frustrated, the trenches are awful, the blasts of artillery numbing.
Then, somebody shouts over the din, with a megaphone: "It's Christmas Day! Hold your fire!" The artillery blasts trail away, leaving only confusion. Was that the Russians' commander? Or was it a Ukrainian? Again, the message is repeated, seeming louder now that the artillery has stopped. A minute passes. Then, the first Ukrainian passes over the top of the trench, arms in the air, bearing no weapons. The Russians are confused, trying to figure out what they're meant to do, but do not fire. Then a few more Ukrainians follow, slowly stumbling over the moonscape of no man's land. A brave Russian soldier decides to get up and walk out and meet them halfway. Then a few more. Within 15 minutes, there are over 500 soldiers, Russian and Ukrainian alike, standing around in no man's land. They talk, first haltingly, then more freely. About the weather. About what's back home waiting for them. About the weapons they've been given by their countries.
This continues for another half an hour, until the Ukrainians bring out their phones. The Russians aren't allowed them, of course, but the Ukrainians keep them so they can take pictures for Ukrainian propaganda purposes. They have Starlink connections. A Ukrainian soldier loads up Pokemon Go. A couple others happen to have the app, while the rest start downloading it. They show the cute creatures to their new Russian friends. Laughter is the main sound now, not artillery. Somebody finds a shiny; tens of soldiers gather round to see. In return for this fun, the Russians give the Ukrainians some gifts, of blankets and alcohol.
The soldiers eventually have to go back. It's 12:00 and the commanders have figured out what's happened and are ordering the soldiers back to the trenches. But the impression is lasting. The artillery resumes for the rest of the day, but the soldiers are disgruntled. They talk amongst themselves. Why should we continue to suffer, and make others suffer? For what purpose is this war fought? The murmuring turns into the beginnings of plans.
A week later, a note from the Russians is sent across the no man's land in secret. An affirmative is sent back by the Ukrainians, hours later. At midnight, the soldiers begin slowly, and very quietly, killing their officers. On both sides. The news of what happened on Christmas has spread like wildfire across the front and, more surreptitiously, a plan for a mass mutiny. Within five days, the entire front is in armed revolt; now, instead of two sides crashing into eachother, they're moving outwards, back towards their countries. The Nazi paramilitaries, who shoot the retreating Ukrainians, are killed too. The situation is out of control of both commands.
This revolt spreads throughout both countries. The grievances of the last thirty years of post-Soviet poverty have built up to a crescendo. The masses desire the blood of the oligarchs. Manors are burned; superyachts are sunk by rogue battleships. The revolt spreads even further, throughout eastern Europe. And further still, to the suffering and the cold in central and western Europe. The capitalists who are able to make it away fly to New Zealand, to their bunkers, before either climate change or nuclear war could have done so. The revolution has spread to the Middle East, to Asia, to Africa, to South America. North America is the last to fall, but fall it does. The vents of the bunkers of the rich are covered with dirt, smothering them. The post-capitalist world has arrived, in an inferno of fire and blood. The communists are in control, building workers' soviets and distributing the means of production to all.
The lesson? Marx failed to consider Pokemon Go.
Imma make you write official hexbear fanfiction
Ukraine orders punitive measures on clerics with Moscow links
Ukraine can have a little neo-McCarthyism, as a treat.
The EU has recognized the "Holodomor" as genocide. Surely they will now move to recognize the Bengal famine as genocide as well considering there is actual hard proof of that.
Or Yemen, that many European nations are actively aiding and abetting
This fucking sucks, I give it 10 years before the officially recognised narrative is that the Eastern Front was Axis infighting :agony-shivering:
- https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-lawmakers-unveil-bipartisan-bid-ban-chinas-tiktok-2022-12-13/
- https://nitter.net/CarlZha/status/1602903136502366208#m
Some interesting things on the upcoming TikTok ban, which have weirdly passed under the radar both in MSM and leftist spaces:
The proposed bill is not just banning the TikTok servers from accessing the U.S. It intents to block the entire parent company from financial dealings with U.S companies. What this means is that if/when the bill passes, TikTok will be banned from the App Store/Play Store on every single device in the world
Although portrayed as an anti-TikTok legislature, TikTok is actually not mentioned anywhere inside the actual text of the bill. Instead it refers to "any social media company in or under the influence of China and Russia". Once the bill has passed, it gives the U.S. the ability to ban GLOBALLY literally any single software product, which has Russian/Chinese shareholders - Yandex, Beidou, Alibaba, Tencent's WeChat(biggest social media in the world).
Worst part: They have targeted gamers. Gamers! As Tencent is a "social media company", :amerikkka: holds the right to ban Legaue of Legends, Valorant, Fortnite, Clash of Clans, PUBG and any other game co-owned by Tencent.
On a more serious note: The bill can also be used to target companies even outside of its social media subsidiary. Tencent or Alibaba using servers with AMD and Intel chips? Not anymore!
You forgot to mention the best one: :reddit-logo:
Imagine the public outcry if the US government actually banned Reddit because Tencent is a major investor.
They'll start banning chinese companies from investing into US assets before long.
I feel like this would be pretty damaging for the US too, though? I'm personally curious about to what extent we'll see capitalists (with their short-term profit interests) try and oppose the economic war on China. Lobbying and such.
I wonder what China's response to this would be, if they decide to do one at all (the government hasn't had the best track record of actually responding to American aggression).
Regardless, China is getting decoupled from the West, whether they want to or not. I think Xi to a certain extent saw this coming and has hopefully been spending the last year since the invasion figuring out what to do about it, but we'll see if it's adequate. I could totally see this ending up like the sanctions on Russia have ended up (very unsuccessful depending on your metric) but Putin also seems to be more proactive and willing to fight back, and he's mainly fighting (economically speaking) Europe, which is just America's lapdog - whereas China has to take on America itself going for their jugular.
True. I also don't think they are really going to flex muscles right away. US-Europe relations are in a very crucial 1-2 years and banning Europeans from TikTok will probably rock the boat too much.
However I think the main point of the legislature is a message to the Chinese Tech Industry "The west is our market. Don't expand here or else". If I was a CEO of an upcoming Chinese social media, I would definitely think twice before expanding in Europe/US knowing that my entire company can now be banned on a whim
Regarding TikTok, I think it will get away with some back door deal like sharing its user data with the US Gov or giving its algorithm to Silicon valley, worst case scenario is a US-only ban
These numbers do obscure some real pain. Oil and natural gas have surged in terms of GDP meaning a 1.5% decline in GDP means as big as that surge was, it was slightly smaller than the decline in other parts of the economy.
Which matters in that oil and gas is much less labor intensive than almost any other major economic activity. So while overall it’s just a 1.5% drop in GDP, and so the capacity of Russia to wage war is probably close to unaffected, these numbers do imply significant job losses in the economy.
Of course, mobilizing 300,000 working age males probably offset that significantly as well, but still those are some wild economic gyrations for the common people to live with.
It's starting :deeper-sadness:
And by "it" I mean both the devastating spike in Chinese covid deaths and the Western media turnabout from "why won't China end zero-covid" to "why is China letting their people die".
Basically, China did what the West wanted, is going to suffer the consequences, and the West still just attacks them for it.
Time, it's-a loop! :stalin-smokin:
Formerly, the chief exploiters were Britain, France, Germany, and partly America; that circle has now shrunk to an extreme degree. Today, the major financial exploiters of the world, and hence its major creditors, are North America and to some extent her assistant — Britain.
That does not mean that Europe has sunk to the position of a colony. The European countries, while continuing to exploit their colonies, have themselves now fallen into a state of financial subordination to America and, as a consequence, are in their turn being exploited, and will continue to be exploited by America. In that sense, the circle of major states which exploit the world financially has shrunk to a minimum, whereas the circle of exploited countries has expanded.
That is one of the reasons for the instability and internal weakness of the present stabilisation of capitalism.
-- Stalin at The 14th Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.), December 1925
:cia: Peruvian Crisis Updates :castillo-cowboy:
Peru’s Castillo says he’s still president; international allies abd supporters agree.
The leftist presidents of Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Bolivia insisted that the jailed leader remains the rightful president of this troubled South American nation.
The joint communique issued by Castillo’s international allies added to the tensions. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Argentine President Alberto Fernández, Colombian President Gustavo Petro and Bolivian President Luis Arce called on Peruvian authorities to “abstain from reverting the people’s will expressed in free suffrage.”
They emphasized the fact that many of the conservative lawmakers who voted to remove Castillo had refused to accept the legitimacy of Castillo’s electoral triumph last year in the first place.
Lula da Silva prefered to remain neutral as he is still only President-Elect. Gabriel Boric accused Castillo of being authoritarian.
Seven demonstrators, all teenagers, are reported to have died and 15 police injured in fierce clashes, mainly in poverty-wracked mountain regions that voted heavily for the 53-year-old former rural teacher and union leader in last year’s presidential contest.
Protesters blockaded the Pan-American highway south of the capital, setting tires ablaze, and the airport in the tourist hub of Cusco, forcing flight cancellations. They attempted to reach the congress building in downtown Lima.
Gabriel Boric accused Castillo of being authoritarian.
Among Us player who can't do anything but accuse everyone of being the impostor
common boric L
Kinda lame for Lula to recognize Castillo's vice president, when he openly supported Cristina Kirchner. He seems to be too busy dealing with Bolsonaro not wanting Maduro to come for Lula's Inauguration.
He is very weird, normally in south america, even if a socdem president is an ultraneolib. At least its foreign policy is pro-Latin American unity and anti-US interests. Boric is like if a Democrat became the president of Chile.
honestly if I hear somebody use the word "authoritarian" unironically outside of very select contexts then I just roll my eyes, the educated liberal american brainworm that they're cloning in vats throughout the US has wriggled into their skull and it's too late to do anything about it
like, it reminds me of when some dipshit MSM outlet interviewed a Taiwanese person on what they think about China and the general situation and it was completely indistinguishable from what your average political twitter bluecheck would say about it. it's like in a zombie movie when somebody is infected but hiding it from everybody tears off a piece of clothing and reveals the zombie bite. "oh god, they got you too!?"
r/vexillology users claiming that totenkopf flags on Ukrainian APCs are actually Jolly Rogers.
Shiver me timbers!
lmao it keeps happening, another F-35 crashed
https://www.fox4news.com/video/1155085
Germany was doing training with the new Puma IFV. Over the course of a few day all 18 vehicles broke down. It's laughable how corrupt and inefficient German arms procurement is. Now they just gonna use the Marder of cold war fame for a longer time.
one Polish paper reports that it was a grenade launcher that they accidentally shot at the ceiling lol
Grenade launcher rounds typically have an arming distance (usually somewhere in the 10-40 meters range, depends on the specific grenade, but definitely longer than the height of most rooms), precisely to avoid little incidents like this, so that sounds pretty weird. I guess maybe a really old and malfunctioning grenade or something, I dunno.
that thought occurred to me as well :) the Polish article cites "sources" and the title ends with a question mark, so unclear
the Polish side has asked the Ukrainian side to provide relevant explanations
uh, the Russians did it, somehow
imagine being the guy who plants a bomb in someone's gift and then has to be like "no, you really shouldn't open it here, because, uh... the surprise will be better if you open it back home in Poland, trust me"
How are there so many people that think this is an acceptable consequence of the way we run things?
A lot of people in the UK are going to die over this winter because Putin bad and line go up :sadness-abysmal:
At least he's been taken care of now, but there are so many that won't be.
