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.
The benefit of hundreds of thousands of people not dying far outweighs any possible benefit from not having zero covid. Your daily cafe trip isn't worth anyone's death, let alone that many.
This insistence on a flat number is such a bizarre hill to die on. Like, if there's a nation of 100,001 people, is the limit still 100,000? Is it unnecessary to do lockdowns if 99.99% of people are going to die? Of course not. Obviously the number that's acceptable decreases if you have a smaller population. Which means that it increases when you have a larger population. By denying that you're just being stubborn and absurd.
:wall-talk::wall-talk::wall-talk:
100,000 is bad in any country no matter the percent of population. I don't care if a country had a trillion people, 100,000 deaths of something entirely preventable is still too much even though it's "only" 0.0000001% of the population. To say that a larger country can tolerate more deaths is the same thing as "China doesn't care about its citizens' lives as much because there are so many of them".
But sure, for a smaller country it can be just as bad to the country's economy to lose some fraction of that.
But you do realize I'm talking bad as in people fucking dying and not bad as in "line go down", right?
That's not true at all and not what I'm saying. I'm saying if more people have to experience lockdowns, then it means China would have to pay a bigger cost. If the total number of deaths is higher, but it's a lower percentage of their population, that indicates that they cared more about their people, not less, because that's just how math works.
Yes, I do, and I understand that that's why you're being unreasonable, but that doesn't make it any less unreasonable. There is not, has never been, and almost certainly never will be any major world power who's leaders are unwilling to make cold calculations that involve some number of people dying. Your criticism of China's policy is based on comparing it to a wildly unrealistic ideal that has only ever existed in your head, which I guess is par for the course for a Western leftist talking about an AES state.
I understand also that part of the reason that you're so adamant about being irrational about this is because you're associating this sort of calculus with your own, Western government, which doesn't care about people's lives and is beholden to capitalist profit. But that's different from a government performing such a calculus in good faith, with people's lives being given a reasonable amount of weight. And with Zero Covid, China has demonstrated that they do care about their people's lives. I don't think that that China is changing course because of some spontaneous change in values where they just randomly stopped caring about their people's lives - as you seem to - but rather, I think they weighed that one factor against various other factors and decided that the scales had tipped in the other direction.
It's clear that you're stuck in this mindset that making a calculation that accepts a large amount of deaths is inherently monsterous. Personally, I'd say, "join the club!" You're perfectly willing to sacrifice 99,999 people. That's an unimaginably large amount! You're willing to kill more people than I'll meet in my entire life. You monster. You said that lockdowns were unnecessary for the flu, because it "only" killed like 15,000 people. Do you understand how many people 15,000 is? Barbaric.
So either keep thinking of me as a monster and know that you're one too, or else stop with these arbitrary lines and this childish grandstanding and face the reality where every government makes decisions like this literally all the time.
Yeah but that cost is money and inconvenience, not lives. One of those is worth significantly more than the others combined.
"Actually communism is when you unnecessarily sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives so people won't be inconvenienced."
In basically every other regard, I support China in their move towards communism. And they have still been the best in the world in covid response for having had zero covid for so long. But removing zero covid means they will no longer be managing covid properly. Being an AES state doesn't make them 100% immune from criticism, and this is basically the one thing I've criticized them on, and the criticism is that they're stopping something I praised them for.
No, no I'm not. From the very start I said that's a high ball and still would be horrible. You're the one stuck on the number I gave. My whole point was that while there is no clear line, 100,000 is long past the line, clearly on the side of never worth it. But you've decided to interpret it as the exact opposite.
Even flu deaths are a huge number of lives lost. Whether your line is at 15,000 or 100,000 or 5,000 makes no difference to me. You're looking at it from a fundamentally unreasonable perspective.
Not wanting hundreds of thousands of people to die is an "unreasonable perspective"?
Lol. This entire conversation has been me pointing out all the ways your position is unreasonable, and you completely ignoring that and stonewalling me. You haven't listened to a single word that I've said and yet you keep responding, expecting me to explain it again. Who are you kidding? Just go back and read what I already wrote. I'm not going keep wasting my time on you, I'm disengaging.
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Ok, you can't go out partying either. Staying home isn't "losing out", it's an inconvenience. Unless China was just not at all providing for people who couldn't work because of it, which I doubt.
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