Image is from @Parsani@hexbear.net, who got it from @RNAi@hexbear.net, who got it from Discord.
Thread update: Prigozhin's fucking dead.
The BRICS summit will begin on Tuesday and end on Thursday, with various world leaders, politicians, and representatives meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa.
America's anxiety about the summit has been obvious. They have been complicating the event by pushing for the arrest warrant for Putin to be upheld if he steps foot in the country. While this is a remarkably dangerous and unhinged thing to do - even by America's standards - to the leader of a nuclear superpower who could end the world within an hour, it does betray their desperation. Unfortunately, for those of us who wanted to see Putin surrounded by an army of security guards fending off people holding handcuffs, he has sent his Foreign Minister, Lavrov, in his place. Additionally, America has likely been spreading rumors about the lack of interest in gaining new members in the organization.
With apparently 20 countries formally seeking membership and another 20 informally doing so, the bloc has been elevated, whether they like it or not, to the position of the international vanguard of the non-western world. It is extremely important to say that this is not the same as it becoming an anti-American bloc, and many of them (including original members Brazil and India) wish to keep a friendly relationship with the United States. Nonetheless, with the United States' policy of "if you are not with us, you are against us," and as the US seeks to weaken China, in coming years many of them might find themselves under hostile pressure.
BRICS has to try and solve many problems if they are going to chip away at America's stranglehold of the world economy. These problems - like mitigating the dollar's status as a global reserve currency, and America's dominant role in the world economy - are extremely complicated, and will takes years, even decades, to be overcome. Therefore, one should temper their expectations and excitement for this summit. It took tens of millions of deaths in cataclysmic wars, and then several more decades, for America to reach its current position. I see no reason to believe why its downfall will be any less bloody and elongated.
To end on a less depressing note, I've been searching for appropriate anagrams given the list of countries that seek to join BRICS. Obviously not all of them will make it in, but even so. The best I've come up with is HIBISCUS EMANCIPATES BBBBKKRVV.
(also, "bulletins and news discussion" can be rearranged to "libidinous newsstands uncles".)
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.
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.
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They'll blame everything but their support for war.
A few months ago Danish State Media ("DR") had two amazing pieces back to back in it's nightly programming. The first one was an austerity measure, where Denmark apparently had to cut some staff, as we had a hole in our budget worth about 1,5-2 billion DKK (or some other figure I can barely comprehend). The litteral next segment was a fluff piece about how Denmark was one of the most generous nations when it came to supporting Ukraine, as we had given them equipment for a grand total sum of 1,75 billion DKK. This was of course presented as a fantastic piece of news and showing how good and selfless we are up here in the civilized north.
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Well, Denmark did the West Wing shit back in november and managed to have an election result in a coalition government that split power 3 ways. Our SocDem retained the prime minister position, with the newly crowned centrists of the Moderates taking the Foreign Minister post and with the tradional right wing party "Left" getting the position of minister of defense. While Denmark has a bunch of other ministeries, these 3 were the big ones that the coalition had to divide amongst themselves, which is why it somehow took about a month before we had any fucking government. Said coalition has then been speedrunning the austerity playbook and straight up removed a public holiday, tried to workshop a reform of higher education that would more or less cut a lot of programs in half, oh and they also managed to spend a shitload of public money buying artillery systems from Israel.
Anyway, after experiencing this amazing "not-polarized" coalition, most Danish people are at a loss for what to do next, since we tend to just kick out either the socdems or the centrist liberals whenever they do something stupid. We had a lot of talk from our big unions about a potential general strike, both as a result of the removal of the holiday, and also because inflation was skyhigh when it became time to do contract negotiations. Said strike never materialized, because our unions are cucked and at their weakest since the 1940s.
This sounds like Germany about 5 years ago haha.
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Danish unions used to be quite strong, but ever since the neoliberal turn, they've become buried in paperwork and legal matters, rather than like in the US where you had them forcibly neutered at gunpoint. Also AFAIK neoliberalism didn't come to denmark until the "End of history" period of the 90s, so a lot of older union guys still think it's the 1960s and 1970s and haven't really caught up with the fact that our Social Democrats aren't really a working class party anymore, and that the union's relentless drive to get the SocDems in power is not going to benefit their members.
I honestly don't know if Republicans would abandon Ukraine if they won the presidency. They're only against it because Biden supports it. With a Republican in office, they will switch to supporting whatever the President does.
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It could be another Syria situation where Trump tries to pull out and the DoD and military just lies to him and keeps doing what they're doing.
Lol. Lmao
Or they have a handsome general persuade him to stay in
Maybe I've inhaled too much from Hunter Biden's crack pipe but I'm hopiumming for that too, simply because I'm convinced that Trump would be good for Europe. My main argument - just look what two years of that MF Biden did amount to, we now have the largest land war going since Vietnam and nobody's stopping it.
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