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.
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.
Evidence shows that that they didnt even want to kill the Romanovs and the order to do so did not come from on high. It was a paniced wartime decision and according to the last guy I talked to about this the Whites werent even ACTUALLY coming their way so it wasnt even actually necessary.
They wanted to put Nicholas on trial. Which would have been much better. Put his crimes out there for the world to see. And the kids didn't have administrative power (this includes the ones that already grew to adulthood) so they didnt have crimes to try.
Sorry but the idea that we should kill someone because of blood connections they have no control over is disgusting to me. It smacks of original sin which is not materialist. Why even validate a system we don't believe in like that?
Like, its not going to happen, but if there was a revolution in GB tomorrow by your plan we'd have to assign someone to kill William's kids, who are 10, 8, and 5. How does a healthy socialist society assign someone to execute three grade school children, one of whom definitely hasn't even developed the ability to have cognitive malice yet? Do we want someone who's capable of that to be part of our society after doing so?
It's not moralist, it's an assessment of risk vs. reward. Monarchist revanchism at the time was killing milliions of russians. A couple of people vs. a million, it's not a hard decision if there's any risk at all. There's no "sin" or fault. It's a regrettable conclusion of the monarchist system. To destroy monarchism you have to destroy the monarchal line, they set their system up like this. Russia was in civil war, the whites could never be allowed to win and were ultimately demoralized because they had no tsar left to fight for. The reds should not have won the civil war, it was extremely close and all the odds were against them and all the powers of the world united in opposition. You just don't understand the stakes.
Yeah except again you ignored the part where thats not even what the reds wanted to do with them. It wasnt a calculated risk vs reward decision was it? And again, at least according to this guy, it wasn't even a decision based on what was actually happening. Like yeah, hindsight, but still.
Anyway, I stand by thinking that whatever depraved person is capable of killing a 5 year old for us is not someone I'd want to continue living in my society afterwards, no matter how "pragmatically necessary" it might seem to be.
yes it was. They got bad info, they panicked or were a bit too jumpy and took the initiative. Ultimately it worked out fine. Millions, tens of millions, died in the russian civil war. Who fucking cares. It save tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives in the end probably. You aren't going to make me cry about a couple royal kids. It's obviously not the ideal situation, the ideal situation would be to be able to comfortably and safely store them somewhere and held as hostage. This is a better outcome than them being captured by whites though.
I guess we don't disagree then, really.
I won't pretend I don't have a weakpoint for child death, and that this issue hasnt been a bit of an autistic fixation of mine for awhile. Like, whats past is past and I get the pragmatic necessity of it. I'm more interested in future situations at this point then criticizing the past.
sorry to be a
Tbh I'm the one being a debate pervert here because I'm autistically fixated on this one issue because my soft spot is kids, and I'm suspectable to stories of individual kids despite knowing that thousands more died whos names I dont know. Its a weak point for me. Ive already gotten more involved with it than I should have. Ultimately I know that killing the Romanovs seemed like a pragmatic necessity at the time (even if it was based on bad info)
But yes as much as I dont like to even have that kind of discussion I guess killing 5 kids to save 200k people is rationally correct.
But I am mostly interested in making sure we handle the revolution of the future as correctly as possible. And I would like to avoid having to kill ANY kids when possible, including royals. And doing Puyis instead of Alexies whenever possible. And I'm a bit stuck on my distrust of the person who would be able to go through with executing a 5 year old, whether for the "Greater good" or not.
The whole argument about whether they should've killed Alexei is silly for the simple reason that the kid was already dying and would probably not have survived winter anyways. The big brain move would've been to exchange Alexei for Red POWs, wait for his inevitable death because the White brutes bruised his wrist or accidentally bumped his head against the door or something, and spread propaganda about how the Whites don't actually care about the royal family but are only cynically using them as props as well as spread conspiracy theories about how various branches of the Romanovs murdered Alexei so the crown can be passed to them instead.
And none of this remotely applies to the present because absolute monarchies aren't a thing anymore outside of a few countries like Saudi Arabia, so questions about killing children heirs apparent are a pointless mental exercise. No one needs to worry about potentially killing Crown Prince William's kids because the UK hasn't been an absolute monarchy in centuries. Even places like Saudi Arabia aren't really absolute monarchies in that way. Nobody thinks MBS was personally chosen by Allah to inherit the throne after his father dies.
I definiitly think there are people who think you'd have to kill William's kids after a revolution. i agree with you that they are wrong though.
all good comrade. I don't really disagree really, I think not thinking it through leads to being Shining Path clones anyways. Think I was just seeing the past echoes of this struggle session a couple months ago.
That is the important part. And if we're talking defenseless kids (that is, they're not aiming a gun at you, they don't have the code to the bomb like on an episode of 24, they're literally your prisoners) then it would take a truly tortured form of logic along with some insane scenario to find some utilitarian instance where killing them is wholly justified.
The main problem with that as well as the main problem with talking about the Romanovs of history is that the whole thing about how not killing them "would have ended up killing x-hundred/thousand/million/whatever more" is all just speculation. ImOnADiet correctly put the question as you being omniscient - yeah, if you're omniscient (more to the point, prescient) then it's an easy choice. If not executing the kid really truly did undeniably and unavoidably, as shown in the magic crystal ball, causes so much more death and misery, then killing them probably would be the deeply unfortunate but correct choice. The thing is, no one is omniscient or prescient. There are countless ways, countless likely ways it could well have gone where they survived and the revolution was better for it, not worse off. And so too is any future situation where you have children as your prisoners. The perpetrators of crimes against the people get the wall, zero qualms there. But the kids in your custody, at your mercy who were guilty of no such crimes except to have been born to ghouls deserve profound consideration before you put them against the wall next to fascists. You had better be fucking sure these children are beyond all doubt going to be responsible for future mass death, somehow, with your crystal ball.
For the record, I don't think you're being a debate pervert at all, and feeling strongly about this is not "a weak point," it's quite the opposite. I for one am grateful that you're here and you're asking these questions. I'm appalled by the few people here who think it's like some kind of badge that makes them a serious~tm communist and that no one can accuse them of being a lib for proclaiming how righteous they think the execution of historic children is, or something. So actually seeing someone give a little pushback on that deserves gratitude and appreciation.