There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Palestine! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The weekly update is here.
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.
im sorry but the regular mega is about to expire and i need this opinion out there.
like its fuckin UNUSUAL that Star Wars has versions that override the original versions, right? name one other series that has engaged in such aggressive revisionism on early entries. i cannot think of a single film from the 1970s which you are legally obliged to view with CGI from decades since it was released. fucking ridiculous.
George Lucas is a Marcyite Trotskyite which is why he's constantly having revisionist splits with the origional films even though he has pretty okay political understandings.
completely true
I sincerely do not know why he felt the need to change them. They are better in their original incarnations.
I'm convinced these were just driven by greed as it enabled them to re-release and sell something that is effectively a new product the audience must consume or they're not real fans.
My take is that George sees them as his personal project and likes to tinker with them. Kind of like a painter who comes back every few years to add a few daubs of color to their oil painting or turn a duck in to a songbird or whatever. He doesn't view the movies as a finished product stuck in time, but something he's continually updating and expanding. Lucas is a huge SFX nerd. I'd go so far as to say that he cared more about pioneering new CGI frontiers for the Prequel movies than he did about making new Star Wars. The man just loves cinematography, camera work, and special effects and always wants to try new things, and Star Wars is his baby where he can try to realize his new ideas and see how they work out.
Like dude definitely was out to make his money, but he's also one of the nerdiest nerds who ever nerded, and he's got a more or less unique chance to nerd out however he wants to with millions of dollars of equipment and some of the best artists and technicians alive.
This isn't really unusual with artists. Some people spend their whole life painting and re-painting the same scene, landscape, or concept. Novelists and poets endlessly write and re-write stories, sometimes long after publication. A lot of novelists will continue to expand and develop the same ideas in one series after another, so if you read their books in chronological order you can see the same concepts and characters grow, albeit under different names. It's much less tenable with film as film, especially big budget sci fi, is generally a collaboration between hundreds of artists, actors, and technicians. But even then there are directors who keep coming back to the same themes and projects over the decades.
if it was really driven by greed they'd release the old versions too
from watching interviews and behind the scenes stuff with george i get the impression that he is both obsessively perfectionistic about his work and obsessively interested in visual effects. i truly believe he has spent nights awake thinking about how, now that technology has progressed, he could probably fix whatever weird alien or prop or whatever that didn't quite live up to his expectations
Has anyone ever seen George Lucas and Todd Howard in the same room together?
yeah, old georgie boy just couldn't stop fucking with them
the one good thing about the disney buyout is that we won't get yet another version that's "closer to his vision" and also worse
I would unironically like to see like four or five wildly different directors do re-makes of A New Hope. Just to see what they come up with. Get real weird with it.
Like Visions or Love, Death, And Robots but all the same general film, I love the idea.
It's important to remember that Maria Lucas saved Star Wars in the edit, and that Empire and Jedi weren't directed by George. It's always been an ensemble production and that is never more clear than when you find out some really weird shit is directly from George.
Like his original idea of Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark being 11 when she had her affair with Indiana Jones.
ayyyyyyyyyyyyup. The tube top Ashoka wears in early seasons of Clone Wars was him, too. They got rid of it as soon as he stopped paying attention.
Also kind of funny reading that George straight up said "Yeah this guy is an asshole mercenary who steals stuff, not a real archeologist". That's always been one of my big critiques of the character. It's never really emphasized in related media that he's more or less the exact opposite of an archeologist, just a thief, and the "It belongs in a museum!" line seems like it was taken at face value by a lot of people back in the day.
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There's a really interesting video that sort of debunks that claim, I think you'd like it https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE
To again piggyback on what others have said, Lucas is much more of a SFX and cinema nerd than a story-writer. You can see this in his other films pre-starwars, where the attention to detail on cinematography and sound design is nearly immaculate, even for a student film.
That being said, he has definitely lost his touch as he has gotten older, believing that cluttering the screen and hiding details within the shot is true artistic cinematography. It's weird given how absolutely sterile the prequels feel in comparison, but I would bet if he was given more time, he would be tinkering with those as well.
Star Wars (George's Version)
Funny enough, another Lucas film THX 1138 had a lot of CGI and deleted scenes added to it after the fact.