Israel trying to pass the hospital bombing off as Palestine doing it is utterly disgusting and guarantees Netanyahu a spot in the deepest pit of Hell for all eternity, obviously, but do not forget that

a) the only reason why Westerners will believe it is because they want to believe it - they are not being brainwashed and this is not some masterful propaganda being weaved around us to turn kind-hearted people into monsters,

b) no Westerner opinions matter at all. In most Western countries there is no real anti-Israel option to vote for even if they did realize that Israel was a giant factory for crimes against humanity, and Westerners protesting against things in general almost never achieves anything (tens of millions protested for BLM in 2020 and not only did the situation not change, it got worse), and

c) the people whose opinions do matter (both the people in the region, and the leaders who aren't already Zionist compradors) already know that Israel is full of shit and that they just murdered nearly a thousand civilians in a single bomb attack.

It is despair-inducing to think that the genocidal Zionist entity is so brazenly, so smugly getting away with bullshitting this away into a cloud of confusion, as they release their metaphorical squid ink just like they did with the stupid babies story, but the propaganda and the media narrative that they are creating isn't what matters. It cannot address the fundamental contradictions ripping the country, the region, and the world apart any more than masterfully-applied makeup can fix a stab wound. It can merely obfuscate.


If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.


Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA daily-ish 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 (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 still Palestine! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.


Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.

The weekly update isn't coming because I'm sick and too focussed on the collapse of the Zionist entity.

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.


    • 420stalin69
      ·
      1 year ago

      Look basically it was pretty good. Allocative efficiency was near perfect and it also achieved better technical efficiency than the west without patent rights. The true economic miracle of the 20th century wasn’t China (which was the economic miracle of the 21st) but it was the Soviet Union. You can measure economic growth from the revolution to the fall and it was the highest average growth in the world, and that’s with a vicious civil war and then Hitler devastating the place just to make it hard mode.

      The failure of the USSR was more some kind of failure of morale than a failure of economics. Reform was needed to correct the stagflation of the 70s and 80s, probably a major currency devaluation would have been the most pressing painful medicine, and reform is a constant need so this isn’t an indictment. The Andropov reforms would have been a great modernization. But instead a group of neoliberals gained power in the 80s and instead of devaluing the currency they decided to liberalize the economy which - especially in the absence of a devaluation - unleashed inflation which led to a political crisis, and the response to the political crisis was more liberalization etc until you got Gorbachev and shock therapy which is what actually destroyed the soviet economy.

      Gosplan worked very well.

      • Kaplya
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Largely agree with what you said here, but I beg to differ on this point:

        The failure of the USSR was more some kind of failure of morale than a failure of economics.

        The failure of the USSR was very much an economic failure after Khrushchev came to power and initiated the de-Stalinization campaign that reversed a lot of economic and financial policies during Stalin’s era.

        I will not go into detail (maybe an effort post at some point) such as the liquidation of collective enterprises (artels) that formed the backbone of Soviet light industries and consolidated them under the state planning program, which turned out to be a disaster.

        But a significant turning point happened when Khrushchev defaulted the Soviet government debt in 1957. Both Lenin and especially Stalin understood very well the role of domestic public debt in financing state projects, which is why the USSR could transform from a backward country full of illiterate peasants into a highly industrialized, spacefaring nation within a single generation, while its citizens paid little to no taxes. That’s because Stalin understood that the government has to spend money (by creating them out of thin air) and a consequence of that is the exponential growth of the government/public debt.

        Khrushchev basically said in 1957 that “the government debt is too high! we can no longer afford to service the debt!” and froze income payment for the next 20 years (and which never really resumed even after Khrushchev) - essentially, austerity. This led to reduced government spending and the drastic drop in the savings of the Soviet citizens, because the government refused to service its debt (imagine if the US government had defaulted during the debt ceiling debacle a few months back). This was also the inciting incident that led to the Novocherkassk massacre in 1962 responding to labor protests.

        To put it simply, the domestic public debt always has to expand because more government spending means people have more savings. The neoclassical economists have this completely backward and believe that the government cannot spend more than what it taxes, which is wrong. Stalin was truly a financial genius for understanding this, which was what allowed him to take the USSR out of the NEP and entered the Five Year Plan starting in 1929.

        Trotsky, on the other hand, had the totally opposite understanding of money (read his Marxism in Our Time (1939) text which basically said that FDR’s New Deal will bankrupt America because there’s no way the government can pay for that, and this is simply false and a faulty understanding of how central bank works). This is why the USSR under Trotsky would likely never have gotten off the ground, let alone entering a state planned economy because it wouldn’t have the means of financing its state projects!

        • 420stalin69
          ·
          1 year ago

          I don’t think that’s true, savings rates in the USSR were very high.

          In fact it was the very high savings rate that necessitated a currency devaluation.

          Basically with a command economy you can control prices and therefore lock price inflation down, but that inflation didn’t go away it just transformed into savings and a “cash overhang”.

          https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/1991/055/article-A001-en.xml

          • Kaplya
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            None of what you said changes the fact that Khrushchev defaulted on USSR’s quasi-compulsory state bonds (i.e. domestic public debt), which was critical for financing public projects during Stalin’s era at unprecedented scale:

            The Ministry of Finance also began to warn that payments on the bonds for interest and prizes could not continue at current levels due to the burden on state finances and the inflationary risks associated with introducing billions of rubles into circulation in the form of interest, prizes, and redemption payments, money that could not be matched by consumer supply. In 1956, Minister of Finance Arseny Zverev predicted that, by 1960, state payments would reach 37.7 billion rubles, up from 30.2 rubles in 1955, or a rise of 25 percent. The government, by then, owed 228 billion on the bonds. By the end of the sixth Five-Year Plan, that would rise to an estimated 350 billion and, by 1960, the Soviet government would have to make 21.5 billion rubles in payments, he emphasized. Bondholders were poised to “recapture a real nest egg, possibly worth two or three times what [they] had paid for it,” in the words of long-time critic of the bonds, Franklyn D. Holzman.

            In March 1957, the presidium of the Party Central Committee decided to abolish the bonds, leaving them “in the hands of the bondholders (as a symbol of their investment in the common project of building socialism).” That April, in meetings with workers and peasants in Gorkii, Khrushchev came clean about the size of the state’s debt—by then, around 260 billion rubles. Though they had played a crucial role in financing socialist development, Khrushchev explained, the mass bonds had become a drain on state finances. The government was stuck in a “vicious cycle” because payments rose with each passing year: he estimated that in 1957, around 16–17 billion rubles would be spent on prizes and redemption payments, while in 1958, the government would pay 18 billion rubles and, by 1967, 25 billion rubles—almost the entire sum that would be obtained from planned proceeds of the bonds in 1957. As a result, the government planned to halt all future issues as of 1 January, 1958 and freeze payments on existing bonds for 20 years. A “light bond” of 12 billion rubles was issued in 1957 instead of the planned bond of 26 billion. Despite the massive unpopularity of the move and accusations that the Soviet government had stolen “our only savings,” a recurring line in letters of complaint, the last mass subscription bond was significantly oversubscribed.

            Forestier-Peyrat and Ironside, The Communist World of Public Debt (1917–1991): The Failure of a Countermodel?, 2020

            The authors perspective is neoclassical in nature, but the numbers cited are correct. By refusing to expand the public debt, this crushes the ability of its citizens to spend, and therefore straining the productive capacity of its economy.

            It is no surprise that economic growth began to slow and plateau starting from 1960, after experiencing almost 30 years of unprecedented growth (in all of world’s history) since Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan in 1929.

            This is not to say that this was the only mistake that the Soviet government made under Khrushchev. There were many others when it comes to reversing Stalin’s policies, this was merely one of the major ones.

            • 420stalin69
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              I think you’re pointing at the same problem just from a different angle. Excess public debt is an excess savings rate when that public debt is held by the citizens, it’s the same thing, a high wealth to income ratio, which is what I’m pointing to. That’s what you’re pointing at as well.

              Or am I missing something?

              In a capitalist model this would have been experienced as price inflation, which is exactly what happened when they liberalized the economy. In a command economy it’s expressed by too much savings which is what you saw in the USSR over the 70s and 80s. Not enough places to spend the cash so it got saved and created a cash overhang.

              The purely neoclassical argument doesn’t really apply to the soviet economy since it was centrally planned and didn’t rely on consumer spending for growth, but this did mean for example TV sets were always under supplied since people had excess cash compared to the price of a TV set. But production of consumer goods at the very macro scale wasn’t determined by a price signal under Gosplan so the neoclassical analysis doesn’t make much sense.

              A devaluation would have solved that basically overnight by essentially wiping out savings and the value of debt, albeit painful medicine but less painful than shock therapy where this happened anyway in a chaotic manner via regular inflation.

              I think we actually agree on the problem to be honest but you’re looking at it from a slightly different angle using a neoclassical lens.