On Tuesday and Wednesday, this year's NATO summit will take place in Vilnius, Lithuania, in a grand meeting of some of the most awful ghouls currently populating the planet
Despite strong efforts and words from Ukraine, membership is still very unlikely to be forthcoming and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Sweden might not get membership for a while either, as Erdogan continues to play both sides off each other, but who can truly say.
All of this is in the wake of Biden announcing the delivery of cluster bombs to Ukraine, as he admits that they are running out of other munitions to send, ensuring that Ukraine, its people, and its children - the ones that remain, anyway - will continue to suffer for many, many generations to come. Cluster bombs have, I believe, already been used in the conflict, but now will presumably be used at a higher rate. The leader of Cambodia, a country that is a major victim of US cluster bombing, has said:
"It will be the worst danger for the Ukrainians for decades or even centuries if those cluster bombs are used," Hun Sen said.
"I know for sure that Cambodia is small and weak, and our voice is weightless, but with our pity towards the people of Ukraine, I call on the U.S. president, the provider, and the Ukrainian president, the recipient, not to use cluster bombs in this war because the real victims will be civilians, especially the Ukrainian ones," he said.
What a perfect exemplification of the conflict as a whole. Millions of Ukrainians will be thrown into the inferno, entirely disposable in the eyes of the West, so long as we burn some Russians in the fire.
The suffering is the point.
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.
This week's first update is here in the comments.
This week's second update is here in the comments.
This week's third update is here in the comments.
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.
The libs I know that were horny for Ukraine at the start have not posted at all about the NATO summit.
I hope they're feeling a little embarrassed about the naked geopolitics on display.
It feels like the only reason to be a leftist at this point isn't to try and fix or save the world, it's just to be able to say "I told you so" to the lib that was fused to my abdomen during the fallout while we hang out in our cave and eat lizards.
Having not built even 0.0001% of communism etc
Well, we have to share the chores to keep the radioactive dust out of the cave and obviously being fused to my abdomen he can't help quite as much but still receives his ration of lizard kebab. Each according to his ability and all that. I'd say communism achieved! 😎
Was referencing disco Elysium s quote about sad old bitter communists
Oh, I didn't play that game!
When you internalize the communism thought, you get this message (Kras Mazov is this setting's Marx and also Lenin, and Communism has been brutally defeated by the inhuman bourgeoisie after the global revolution.)
Game knows us bitter old commies too well.
It's an attractive ideology for the current moment because it means that you will be correct about something 98% of the time which is nice if you care about owning people online. Just being able to remember things that happened more than 6 hours ago gives you a pretty massive advantage in arguments, let alone reading actual books about history and economics and science and so on rather than having it be described to you by obnoxious reddit comments, long twitter threads, and so on.
but yeah, until conditions change in the West all we can do is try and help people survive, become disciplined ambassadors for the left, and maybe try and form some unions. it's not a hopeless situation but it's very, very difficult to imagine a tangible socialist alternative arising out of the barren soil we currently have. really just hoping that multipolarism will sufficiently weaken the West to help us out
Just as you can’t prove an evangelist predicting the end of the world wrong, you can’t prove a lib wrong purely because they’re uninterested in facts but heavily invested in unexamined ideology.
Yeah. I remember back in my angry atheist days I believed that I could somehow craft an argument that would get people to drop creationism (lol), and that part of me still exists and gets trapped in conversations. I think of it as stunningly naive though. Hanlon's razor is mostly applicable to people who are in your life that you trust to have your back as a behaviour, not random internet weirdos and not as an all-encompassing philosophy for social interactions.
The Michael Parenti vs Christopher Hitchens debate really shows the limits of atheism as an ideology when compared to Marxism and historical materialism. And I say that as an atheist myself. Atheism is not an ideology for me, anymore than off is a TV channel.
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I've softened on it a lot. Like, you know, majority catholic cuba has a better marriage and family legal code than we here in Australia do (but also, the choice of religion doesn't seem as important to someone as their relationship to power and material). I think though, I just kinda checked out of the scene was dropped out a couple of years before elevatorgate.
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Elevatorgate was the big marker where internet atheism took the mask off the undercurrent of misogyny that always existed in the space. I was generally more interested in the social space than reading texts, though I did read a couple.
It also had totally unaddressed libertarianism (of the right wing kind) as basic assumption for most of the members; pretty much all the advice I saw given from more mature members to younger ones is exactly the same as in modern libertarian spaces.