The Great Housing Mission of Venezuela, launched in 2011 by Hugo Chavez, is the most ambitious housing project in the country's history. This week, the 4,600,000th house was built, with a goal for 5 million homes by 2024 and beyond. The program has built 1,255 residential complexes on a total of 9,837 hectares, an area equivalent to six times the Swiss city of Geneva.
The program additionally provides social infrastructure like schools, subsidized food markets, and recreational and green spaces. Over 70% of constructions are self-managed by communities, with financial and logistics support from the government. Communities also provide each other with materials - from each according to their supplies, to each according to their needs. Russian, Chinese, and Belarusian companies have helped supply the program over the years.
In Antímano Parish in southwestern Caracas, a group of predominantly women came together in 2015 and trained in construction, cleared land, and then built apartments while under the pressure of food and materials shortages and electricity blackouts due to the United States' sanctions campaign.
Claudia Tisoy, a mother and self-trained plumber, said “This goes beyond building homes for our families, we are also building the future of our country, with women leading the way. This is what the socialist horizon is all about.”VA
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
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
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
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 and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
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 all socially reactionary. 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 ~ A 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. Produces interesting and useful maps.
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.
In France following the new police union deal a French policeman can't be named in public for facts related to their work even if they are indicted, they can't be suspended without salary, they can't be put on pre-trial custody, and there will be "specialised judges" handling all police-related cases who get special police training.
I am not joking when I say that it looks like the Police just performed a coup in France. Even this statement beforehand looks like a coup with the cops stood behind Darmanin.
Shit just got really really fucking interesting in France. There is nothing like this anywhere else in the western world. Completely anonymous cops that cannot be deanonymised and get their own super special judges handling only police cases. The police literally have France by the balls and there is nothing the French government can do about it because they need the police.
Prediction: Conflict with the cops is about to go through the roof. Their behaviour will worsen considerably as a result of this, and that worsened behaviour will have a reaction in the population, which with the French having been fighting so long will be even bigger escalations.
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Certainly a police-state fascism forming there yes. They are accelerating it as a result of internal pressures.
This however is in my opinion rapidly increasing the contradictions. Every single thing I've seen happen in France over the years has been an escalation. Where is the off-ramp for these escalations for the French state? Eventually the explosions of anger among the population are going to outstrip the state's resources and then the state is going to be at significant risk of revolution.
Where is the release valve for all the pressure that is building up year after year after year?
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There would absolutely be an international attempt at an intervention. What that would look like I'm not really sure. A French revolution would probably still retain a nationalist character because it would draw on the French revolutionary history. Foreign involvement in that is only going to help such a revolution because it would feed revolutionaries with a foreign enemy to point nationalist energy at.
Obviously I don't think this is like right around the corner or anything but I can't help but see a distinct trend in France that I can't ignore. And every action the French state seems to carry out seems to only further solidify my opinion that it is definitely going to get heavier and heavier there over time.
Like let's judge what happens next:
The police behave worse
The people get mad
Nothing happens to the police
The people get even madder
The police crack down
The people get even madder
The police get even worse
Nothing happens to the police.
And this goes on and on and on and on because there is no more way for the French government to crack down on the police's behaviour. This feedback loop is really really bad. But the police have them by the balls because without the police then a revolution is easy. It's the kind of tightening contradiction that leads to an almost inevitable outcome unless the people's energies are diverted elsewhere by something some how.
France seems like it might be heading to a civil war more so than a revolution. It would be interesting to see what happens with the French military. My understanding is that the infantry is much more diverse than the cops.
How would the French even fight though? The people have no weapons and there isn't an existing rebel group or anything of the sort
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France has nukes Russia would never do that
while the human cost of that would be immense I can't help but
significant minority of the weapons sent to ukraine are unaccounted for, if they can show up in mexico then i'm not ruling out a few of them ending up in france as well
also how hard would it be for some enterprising gunrunner to just ship em in from somewhere like libya?
Depends who ends up on what sides. If the miltiary or parts of the military sides with the anti-government protestors, it would come from there. Arm shipments from friendly external forces is another possibility.
Traditional European pastimes like pogroms or wars could easily be that "something".
War of The Eighth Coalition
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I am getting this from French comrades too, but I actually have some family in France and am not really seeing the same thing they're seeing. Compared to the British situation at least I see significantly more positives.
One way or another I still see the clash between the population and the state continuing and I still see this as only producing more and more radicals over time. I see this as producing experienced fighters who consistently get better at fighting the state. I see short-term imprisonments occurring that are only creating more radicals with nothing to lose.
You're correct that they are disorganised at this time. Revolution is not seen as viable at this time which is why this organisation is not occurring. But a country can not continue to increase the numbers of radicals forever through these feedback loops without something eventually snapping.
The main issue as I see it is how you can convince people of the viability of revolution in order to get them organised.
Sometimes brutal crackdowns work and destroy the morale of the opposition. See: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, USA in 2020 and OWS. It’s not a given that people will fight against repression, sometimes they just get beaten down
France's descent into fascism is coinciding with France losing grip over its neocolonies in Africa. It has been losing its grip on Mali and Burkina Faso and it's starting to lose its grip in Niger as well (most of what I've seen paint the couped president as a French puppet). I wonder how connected these two are, and I don't mean this in a vague "France is declining as imperialist power," which is obviously true. I mean it more in terms of are the coups being planned to occur right as France is experiencing domestic unrest? Did Mali kick out French troops knowing that France has to worry about the domestic situation and can't immediately retaliate? France can't simultaneously have boots in both Mali and Paris.
This is also why international solidarity is important. Imagine if the riots occurred at the exact same time as the coups in Africa. Imagine if there was some degree of coordination between the rioters and the coupers.
France taking a flying leap into the cool zone.
Wow France is finally becoming a freedom and democracy country