One year on. Hundreds of thousands are dying or dead, millions are displaced, the Middle East is undergoing its greatest changes in a generation, Iran has directly attacked Israel twice in one year, and Yemen has proven that the US Navy ain't worth shit. We are the closest we have been to nuclear war (discounting accidents) in decades, but also the fall of Israel.
Because one day, the prisoners of a concentration camp paraglided over a wall.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
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 Telegram Channels:
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.
There's been a perfect example of Pre-Privatization and liberal hypocrisy in Portugal this week.
So we got a new center-right PSD government earlier this year, this week during a "Future of Media" conference the prime minister announced that RTP, the national public broadcaster, will gradually no longer have advertising on it until the total removal of ads in 2027, which would mean it would lose 6.6 million euros in revenue in the next 3 years.
Now, in theory, this could free up the channel from commercial influence and market shit, in practice all this means is that in a few years there are gonna be EVEN MORE calls to fully privatize RTP because it's not making any money.
This is functionally the same as when Orban takes over the public broadcaster or some shit, because once RTP is sold to some media conglomerate, it's obviously going to shift right, and serve its funders' interests, but of course there's not a peep from EU institutions about this.
And it's not like RTP today is some leftist or even center-leftist institution, for example in the news segments (the "telejornal") there's been plenty of "Passive Voice" shit when reporting about Palestine, and they have some pretty shitty anchors and guests too. But at the same time there's a lot of series, documentaries (both left and right) and cultural products that just would not get funded on other channels, if RTP gets privatized we'd see even less portuguese cultural production.
Funnily enough at the same conference, the PM also asked for journalists to be "more tranquil" and then complained that journalists ask him questions that they hear in their earpieces instead of asking what they want, which he's being made fun of for (not by me though, because I genuinely hate journalists)
Should mention that on the whole the RTP has like a bunch of channels and radio stations, and also turned a profit last year while the big private media channels didn't
Lol,guess no matter the country PSD sucks
Luso-Romanian partnership
What if they set up a Patreon lol
Funily enough the government already said that they won't increase the tax that funds the RTP so that thing is just going to bleed money until the next big austerity push where it will be very easy to justify full privatization
What would stop this tactic, if anything?
Getting into government, but even if the socialist party comes back they have a habit of doing privatizations too, or not really challenging ongoing privatizations, and right now I'm not too keen on the parliamentary left going into coalition with the PS to "push them left" so I don't really know. Maybe if the PS comes back they'll just increase funding or something