Image is of the Preah Vihear Temple on the Cambodian border. Image sourced from the UNESCO World Heritage website.
Over the last few days, Thailand and Cambodia entered into a heightened stage of conflict due to a long-running border dispute. Like many problems on this planet, Europeans are ultimately to blame - specifically France. Certain sections of the border drawn up by France about a century ago were not fully agreed upon by both sides, with the ownership of some Khmer temples being the most visible points of disagreement.
Despite interventions in favor of Cambodia in the 1960s and later 2010s by the ICJ - one of the mainly mostly useless global institutions that liberals periodically disown - the border conflict has simmered at a generally low level. Of the two countries, Thailand is significantly more militarily and economically powerful.
Last Wednesday, a Thai soldier lost his leg by stepping on a landmine, prompting a rapid escalation between Cambodia and Thailand that has since resulted in dozens of deaths and tens of thousands displaced. Cambodia was willing to come to the negotiating table fairly quickly, but Thailand was more hesitant. International pressure on the two countries by Malaysia, China, and the United States eventually forced Thailand to the table, and they have recently agreed to an immediate ceasefire courtesy of ASEAN.
Notably, Trump refused to hold trade talks with either country until they agreed to peace, which suggests that he really wants a Nobel Peace Prize - which he seems a shoe-in for given that he's met the two most important requirements that several Nobel Peace Prize recipients have needed to meet in the past, which are: 1) start at least one war, and 2) accelerate the genocide of millions of people as billions more people watch on. His policies vis-a-vis ICE creating a domestic terror regime only further increase his chances of winning the prize.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA 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.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
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 Telegram Channels:
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.
His public stance has long been to keep the current police budget, while increasing funding for social workers. He is carefully triangulating to avoid scaremongering from his opponents which could cost him the race.
Let the man cook.
Yeah love to defend selling out as “triangulating”
Am I in 1990?
Would you rather him lose the election to Cuomo or Adams? Because there's literally zero chance of them doing socialism, and they will increase the police budget, guaranteed.
I’d rather he just stay principled and say that police will need to be purged and rebuilt, and actually do that
Also New York has a police force that’s bigger than many nation’s armies and goes and trains in Israel. Yes they need defunded, it’s an absurd position to say they don’t need to be. New York City needs to defund the police moreso than anywhere else on Earth. The New York PD is a massively powerful cartel that runs huge chunks of the city through corruption and graft and its various patronage systems. If Zohran isn’t serious about confronting and dismantling their cartel, then he’s going to get destroyed and dog walked
Let's be frank. He will not embark on this political project for the very simple reason that he has no military behind him, not even some socialist paramilitary. Some genuine socialist being elected to mayor of the center of capital (pop quiz: what city is Wall Street located in) is always a pipe dream. The far more likely possibility is that he's either an opportunist/sell-out/controlled op or he'll do whatever the NYPD tells him to do after being threatened with his life. There's basically zero political cost if the NYPD decides to simply kill him and dump his body in a shallow ditch.
So let's be honest about this whole charade, it's a joke
The 2020 George Floyd uprising showed everyone who was paying attention that most major cities are de facto controlled by the police. I remember there was one police force (NYPD?) who straight up kidnapped the mayor's kid because the mayor wasn't saying the police needed to crack skulls. There was another city (Chicago or LA?) where one councilmember wanted to investigate their police force, so the sheriff simply sicced his goons on them. The police used some court-ordered excuse to dump the councilmember's shit all over the sidewalk and they kept on doing that over and over until the councilmember took the hint and resigned.
We can and should criticise any leftist presenting candidate. That doesn’t mean that we want them to lose.
Has a democratic socialist anywhere in the world ever run on defunding the police?
It's not a tenable electoral position at all. It's a strong slogan for activism because you know that the compromise is going to be somewhere in-between. Much like "fuck cars" or "antiwork" are fun extreme slogans for pulling people to left with entertaining extremism but everyone understands they're not tenable positions, the compromise would always be something in-between. Without a revolution of course.
What he should be careful of is using language like "grown". It implies the former movement was childish when it was not. It undoes some of the work it did. He should simply say that's not what he's running on and not what he would seek to carry out, something like "those movements had a useful purpose in using strong language at that time but they're not what the current moment calls for nor what I would implement". It's possible to say that's not what he wants without unintentionally putting down what was absolutely a good movement.
It's starting to grate a little bit whenever he says some DemSoc shit and everyone farther left is going "SEE?? what did you expect??" And it's like yeah, this is pretty much exactly what I expected as someone farther to Zohran's left, but like you're saying he could do a bit more fine tuning on the language.
Of course it would be foolish to consider him revolutionary (as a mayoral candidate, his personal feelings and thinking are almost certainly to the left of his platform, but we'll see). It's a good thing that nobody actually thought that though.
Ah yes, he’s hiding his power level
I don't understand why anyone is arguing about this. Nobody argues that Mick Lynch or Corbyn weren't hiding their power levels. Lynch specifically said it's ridiculous that the media were calling him a communist when he absolutely 110% is lmao
I don't see what is different here. Zohran is definitely personally left of what his electoral policies and media presentation are going to be.
Come on now