Image is from the January 2023 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Over 50 heads of state and 600 CEOs attended.
holding flashlight under face
Imagine a terrifying world where we are all ruled by monsters of every stripe. And not hot ones like werewolves, but instead decaying zombies and mummies who are both insensitive to, and actively benefit from the immense suffering they cause on a daily basis. The top echelon of society, filled with profit-seeking, bloodsucking vampires. And the worst of it is that they repeat on a daily basis that what they are doing is not only just, but there is no other possible way to do it.
Pretty spooky, right? What if I told you that this world... was our own?
Happy Halloween!
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
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.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Lebanon! 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.
This week's first 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.
Blinken's son wearing a Zelensky costume for Halloween and then begging Biden for treats is unintentionally one of the funniest things I've seen. America is so fucked lmao, this country isn't serious anymore
LETS GO LESBIANS
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Showhttps://truthout.org/articles/uk-lesbian-collective-demands-ends-to-british-funding-of-israels-military/
One of the Jewish groups at my university just sent a campus wide email about how all the Palestinian groups on campus support terrorism and are making Jewish students feel unsafe. This was directly in response to a statement a Palestinian group made that did, in fact, condemn Hammas, but then said blatantly anti-Semitic things like cutting off water to Gaza was bad, and bombing densely populated areas of Gaza is bad and should be stopped.
When my Lib/Reddit brained colleague went into FULL Russophobia last year, I thought I saw the high water mark of Lib overreaction IRL. But here we are.
It still fucks me up that the US participated in the genocidal murder of hundreds of thousands of Yemeni people to near complete global indifference.
On the bus (and we've got 3 full busses) and the first sign I saw someone writing in the parking lot gave me hope
The sign said "Genocide Joe"
Iron Dome interceptors are now under extreme rationing. Most rockets fired from Gaza are now hitting Tel Aviv.
Very likely they're now shitting themselves about Hezbollah and having wasted almost all of the Dome's stockpiles on Gaza's fertiliser rockets instead of on the real missiles they might be dealing with soon.
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Israel’s UN ambassador wears yellow star during Security Council meeting
Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan has worn a yellow Star of David with the words “Never Again” while addressing the UN Security Council.
“From this day on, each time you look at me, you will remember what staying silent in the face of evil means,” Erdan told the meeting.
“Just like my grandparents and the grandparents of millions of Jews, from now on, my team and I will wear yellow stars,” he added.
hoooooly shit I fucking hate these people so much. could they get any more psychotic?
Tiananmen tank man stands in front of tank, tank drives around
"What a cruel display of authoritarianism! Literally George Foreman 1989!"Rachel Corrie stands in front of a bulldozer and gets crushed to death
"A shining beacon of democracy in the Middle East! Uncritical support to the freedom-loving Israelis!"wake up
read news
warcrimes are happening and people are being genocided
brush teeth
go to work
The feeling in my stomach is very weird. I'm oddly calm considering that tomorrow may bring a level of death and destruction that is unprecedented. You news mega regulars know that Mr LargePenis here is Syrian-Lebanese with family in both Beirut and Damascus. Despite that, I'm not scared, don't really know why tbh. Feeling some sort of insane optimism that I have never felt when it comes to Palestine, Lebanon and the general state of the Middle East. My brain is telling me that this is irrational, but deep inside I feel like I fully trust Nasrallah, Iran and the Palestinian resistance. I just want tomorrow to come quick, my brain is all scrambled and I'm finding it hard to focus on anything.
yo Iran if you’re openly stating Israel has crossed your red lines and you’re not doing anything don’t call it a red line
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The world has voted nearly unanimously for the 31st time at an annual UN vote for a resolution calling to end the US blockade on Cuba
Against 2: Israel, US
Abstention 1: Ukraine
For 187: Everyone else
The UK government and media rhetoric around anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian is getting more and more dangerous.
At first the protests were 'upsetting' and 'insensitive'. But they continued to grow.
Then they escalated to being inherently anti-semetic, with anything as mild as displaying a Palestinian flag being called anti-semitism, as well as hyperfixating on the phrase "from the river to the sea". Police have begun harassing people flying Palestinian flags in public, in their own homes, and 'detaining' people with clothing featuring it at public events.
The Home Secretary wrote to police forces saying "I would encourage police to consider whether chants such as: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world. Behaviours that are legitimate in some circumstances, for example the waving of a Palestinian flag, may not be legitimate such as when intended to glorify acts of terrorism.”
The needle on the 76% of people who support an immediate ceasefire didn't move, so the state and media escalated again.
Then the allegations became that they were inherently pro-Hamas, with numerous journalists and political guests stating without a shred of evidence that Hamas was present in the protests and were "handing out Hamas leaflets". This tactic isn't just a smear for publicity, because Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK it's an attempt to create a framework to apply terror charges to peaceful protesters. Numerous labour politicians have openly called for all Palestinian solidarity protests to be banned outright.
Still, it hasn't swayed opinion and the protests have continued and are growing.
So now the new framing is that the protests and protesters are being controlled by Iran. Half a million people at the London protest alone, apparently being directed by Iran. This isn't just cranks on the extreme right channels like GBNews, this has been the framing from Sky News and the BBC this morning. This has been coming from people affiliated with the government, who are today holding an emergency COBRA meeting to discuss 'the rising threat of terrorism' associated with the reaction to the state's support of genocide.
The head of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley went on television and said “When you’ve got state threats from Iran, you’ve got terrorism being accelerated by the events and hate crime in communities. For Jewish communities, it’s now about a 14-fold increase in antisemitism in London, and for Muslim communities it’s nearly threefold. So this is really precarious. In the middle of it, we’ve got these big protests.” Both the BBC and Sky News matched government and police accusations of Iranian control and terror concerns with images of the peaceful marches.
The police have announced that 5 people have been charged with offences during this weekend's marches. 5 out of what some are saying was 500,000 in London. And they haven't released what those offences were apart from "assaulting a police officer" which is the go to bullshit charge for anyone suffering police aggression and "carrying an illegal placard" which is worth remembering that police also arrested people for holding up blank placards to protest the King's coronation.
Obviously this is incredibly dangerous, but it's also disgustingly Islamophobic, just as it would be to state that all British Jews are secretly controlled by Israel, while completely erasing the numerous Jewish peace activists and groups at the centre of these protests. And of course, it's going completely unchallenged.
The good news is that it doesn't seem to be working. The bad news is that they're getting ever more desperate and so a much worse crackdown seems inevitable.
