Thread image created by yours truly, depicting Iran and Pakistan very impolitely not asking whether America, on the other side of the planet, is okay with them transporting gas around.
The Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline has long been obstructed by American involvement in the region. Iran completed its section of the pipeline quite quickly, but Pakistan has been unable to finish its construction for a decade due to the fear of falling afoul of American sanctions on Iran. The United States has repeatedly tried to pressure Pakistan to give up the project and obtain gas from other countries instead. Recent articles on the state of the pipeline are contradictory, with some stating that Iran or Pakistan have given up on the pipeline while American sanctions persist. Pakistani officials reject this framing, saying that they are still working with Iran to try and get the project completed somehow. Nonetheless, Iran is becoming increasingly frustrated and is threatening a legal battle and a demand for reparations.
Meanwhile, back in Niger, the $13 billion under-construction pipeline connecting Nigeria and other West African countries to Spain and Italy will likely face delays due to the sanctions applied by the West and ECOWAS on Niger. Those following the European gas fiasco will be aware that while Spain and Italy have been impacted by the energy crisis, they have been very busy making deals with African countries to replace their Russian gas, and thus stand a better chance than Germany of making it through the crisis with their industries somewhat intact. The coup has thrown a wrench into their plans, though they can still obtain some gas from northern African countries.
And, last but not least, America tried for years to stop the construction of the Nord Stream pipelines between Germany and Russia, which culminated in them deciding to blow them up late last year.
All in all - the United States really does not like it when countries build up energy infrastructure and gain some independence from them.
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.
also @Alaskaball@hexbear.net, what do you mean by a megathread review play-by-play megathread? like we go through the 52 megathreads that year and sort them into chad vs virgin or something?
also worth noting that our three top news megas are, in order, the very first one that @Alaskaball@hexbear.net hosted at the start of the war to contain the initial shitstorm of "god damn it this fucking sucks" at 2023 comments, the Wagner munity news mega at 1606 comments, and the news mega when Russia started its missile bombardments of Ukraine in October with 1345 comments. so the technical record to beat is 2023
I'm thinking like "what major thing happened in this megathread" kind of deal as a hexbearian timeline of events that you'd do in high school
Which I'm now thinking about means looking at a whole year worth of weeks worth of comments answers to chew through and process.
I was actually considering doing like a yearly State of the World where I go through every country (well, maybe not every country, there's like 200, but most countries) and go through the events that have occurred but that is a phenemonal amount of work. might still do it but it would have to be like, in exchange of two weeks of updates or something in December. so then I was thinking about doing it every month instead and I might still do that, but again, a lot of work.
that being said, I'm doing a lot of organizational and sorting work on things behind the scenes with these updates. nothing to get excited about as the average person here, but once it's all said and done it'll be easier for me to hypothetically do longer-term summaries like the ones I've suggested, if I decide to do them. the issue obviously is that it's always a two steps forward, one step back kind of thing because I can't go into a hyperbolic time chamber to get it all done, it takes time and in that time more events keep happening.
Hi Sisyphus, it's me, your old buddy Sisyphus.
I think @ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml suggestion could help for combing through a lot of the early megas and making a summary of interesting things that happened over the year, but that's gonna be a voluntary thing that boils down to herding inside cats alongside outside cats
I don't think it would be too hard to get a few of the comrades to dedicate to spending a couple hours over what, a week or 2? As long as you gave them pretty clear guidelines on what they're looking for, anyways and a quick way to format it.
I think you would need to like set up a committee of hexbear users who would be willing to do the grunt work of parsing through and sorting out the comments that would actually be worth your time seriously engage with.
we could also use an AI but I'm very reticent about it due to hallucination potential
Yeah I don't think there's nearly enough comments for that, I think it would be easier and you wouldn't have to worry the same way as long as you picked trustworthy accounts.
Use AI as a base line with the prompt "what event is most of the discussion in this post" and then the person doing the reading can ignore anything referencing the main point and see if there is any other interesting discussion that should be mentioned.
Ask it how many countries in africa begin with the letter k
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Now ask the AI. Best I've seen it get was 1.5 countries (the half score being "Kingdom of Eswatini" like bro that begins with an E)
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if you start now you might catch up by end of year