:macron:
The devil went down to China,
He was goin' to give Xi a spiel
He was in a bind, pension reform enshrined
And he was willin' to sit and kneel
Image from this Politico article.
Macron (and Ursula von der Leyen, though nobody seems to care about her) went to Beijing, with the initially stated aim of trying to convince Xi Jinping to bring Russia to its senses. Obviously, the Chinese were entirely uninterested in this given that they had just formed an alliance in all but name with the Russians, and the two countries are now united in both long term economic deals, and also in their opposition to the Western bloc.
Macron's visit has, unexpectedly for me, been an interesting one. It sometimes feels like every media source I see has an entirely new outlook on what happened. But one thing is for certain: the western media appears to be quite annoyed by Macron, because he supposedly went to tell Xi off for being naughty, and then made statements while there warning that Europe must not become America's followers, thus implying he's pursuing an independent foreign policy.
But at the end of the day, all of these words are just... well, words. We shall see if Europe, or at least western Europe, will actually try and strike a balance or if they will continue to be vassals of the US. I'm certainly not holding my breath.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Here is the archive of important pieces of analysis from throughout the war that we've collected.
April 10th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
April 12th's update is here in the comments.
April 14th's update is here in the comments
Sorry everyone, I'm having a busy weekend, so it'll be a three-update week this time around.
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 decent analysis. Avoid the comment section.
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 relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the warzone.
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 ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist (but still quite reactionary in terms of gender and sexuality and race, so beware). If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Another big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia's army.
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
Almost every Western media outlet.
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.
Someone needs to start a quarrel over the merits of military shovel WJQ308 so that someone else can post the classified documents proving them wrong.
60fps 4k HD + award winning sound track
It's a really interesting tactic that I'm sure is consciously performed. Where would you leak content to if you're an intelligence agency? You'd send it to places that you want to see receive a boost.
I think the decades and decades of content leaked on 4chan has been an act of intentionally boosting its profile by putting it into the media. This way every leak is not only fulfilling the goal of the leak but also providing extra benefits. It makes its way to the media anyway so why give it directly to the media with no bonuses?
I got bad news for you regarding those alleged "Q drops". The only thing leaked on 4chan over the decades were edgelord memes. Or are you alleging that anonymous was a government op to discredit scientology and local pd's?
Anon was definitely and still is an op.
An FBI honeypot? Eventually. An "intelligence agency" op? Pffft.
The same accounts that existed way back are literally still in use today pushing anon shit completely in-line with US imperialist interests(youranonnews). It was always dumbass childish edgelord stuff created with the explicit intention of appealing to wayward anti-establishment kids and coopting them into a kind of crowdsourced digital army. The entire Anonymous we are legion op was a precursor to what has now become the OSINT community crowd sourcing intelligence information and spreading it far and wide while spin off ops are elevated into visibility, supported and pushed such as NAFO.
These days they've been reviving the anon shit too. Tiktok is absolutely jam packed with "we are legion" edgelord shit pretending to be anti-capitalist but when push comes to shove on any major issue they side with US imperialist interests, HK, Ukraine, Thailand, etc etc etc. It's an op. It sucks in would-be leftists with aesthetics, rhetoric and shit that barely matters then steers them to support imperialists at the actually critical moments.
I've not seen any anon shit since Sabu rolled on everyone he could. Are you sure the algorithm isn't trying to recruit you?