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.
New Squad pic just dropped and it goes HARD
Is that Greta lmao
They are so scared
Is Greta a communist, an Islamist or a Putinist? Or is she the embodiment of this new axis of evil?
It is ridiculous how angry they are at her. I get why you could call Putin or Hamas evil for killing people. Xi is the leader of a rising superpower who is undoing western hegemony so I understand why he could be evil and scary in the minds of chuds. But Greta? What has she ever done besides saying we shouldn't burn the planet down? I get why reactionaries would be annoyed with her but placing her next to world leaders and organised militias seems like a wild overreaction.
I'm not sure. I thought she was just a radlib, honestly. Maybe she is a socialist.
I feel like Greta is a comrade at heart but the establishment has gotten her a bunch of radlib (crypto fascist) friends to keep her from realizing her power level.
Greta has absolutely terrified reactionaries.
Needs the octopus plushy
https://weekendavisen.bmcdn.dk/media/cache/resolve/image_1200x630/image/6/65525/24564312-illustration-rasmus-meisler.jpg
best image I could find off weekendavisen.dk, but it's cut off
The website it's from is subscribers-only, but becomes suddenly freely readable when you change your user agent to the same one as the google crawler.
And when you do that, you get the whole image; here it is with the background removed:
:the-squad:
That's a great idea, does the same thing work for other pay walls?
It's an old school paywall bypassing technique; it usually doesn't work anymore, no. But it's sometimes worth a try. Especially when you see google managed to index an image for example but you can't access it; means there was a way the crawler managed it without an account in the first place. Sometimes it's an IP whitelist, sometimes they opened the article up just long enough to get indexed, more often these days they go through one of the awful google-provided ways to do it securely, but sometimes it's indeed the user-agent.
:westoid-nightmare:
This display of brainworms comes from the weekly newspaper "Weekendavisen" which positions itself as a media outlet for the educated reactionary. It intersperses conservative vitriol with a pretty ambitious coverage of fine culture and science, all of it with the highest word count of any Danish media outlet. It is not a paper for finance bros but rather for senior bureaucrats, principals and professional academics.