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.
Biden has a really great plan.
Let Israel go hogwild in their killing in Gaza.
Occasionally have aides say Biden is working really hard behind the scenes to "move" the Israelis in more moderate direction.
Enormously threaten Israel's enemies.
Pray there isn't a regional war.
Pray even harder this doesn't become World War I 2.0.
what's biden's end game here? Hamas won't be destroyed to Israel's satisfaction without months of ground war and months of bombing, with all of the Gaza civilian population filtered and moved out of Gaza into Egypt. Is Biden truly prepared to hawkishly watch over and defend Israel as it slowly destroys Gaza over a 6 month period of the entire world screaming at them angrily?
I feel like Biden will cave to pressure to mediate the situation much earlier than it will take for Israel to actually root out Hamas. Then you have failed to destroy Hamas and satiate the zionists, but also destroyed the reputation of the Democratic Party domestically and the USA abroad. It's lose-lose, unless Biden intends to fully commit to the Zionist path and all that entails - which will result only in genocide and/or WW3. The most valid strategy for Biden would be to cut and run right now and reign in Israel in an immediate ceasefire, but he seems unwilling or unable to stop this train from leaving the station.
I entirely agree with the rest of that paragraph. Americans can be perfectly fine with slaughter and ethnic cleansing if they don't see it and if they can ignore it. Americans didn't give a fuck about the carnage and suffering in Iraq during the Iraq War. Of course Americans wanted blood (and revenge) and the MIC figured out how to give it without Americans actually seeing it in the MSM. Americans get so queasy at the sight of even a tiny amount of blood. When it comes to Gaza - the American public has seen years worth of carnage and suffering in just weeks. And Americans don't see this war as an American war.
My wild guess is that Biden and his aides made a huge assumption. And they got everything wrong. They thought his powerful message that the US was 100% behind Israel would be well-received by the American public after Israel started their war. C'mon we've got Israel's back! Of course we do! We're America, jack! Biden and his aides surely all have hopeless cases of "American exceptionalism" brain. They likely figured the war would negatively impact Biden's 2024 bid but they'd muddle through it. I bet they hoped for at least a small Dubya-like glow of Biden being a wartime president. It's always easy as can be to start an endless war. But ending one is always going to be exponential more difficult. It's like Biden and Biden world entirely forget how fraught and fucked up in execution Biden pulling the troops out of Afghanistan was.
The wildcard card Biden is trying to control is Hezbollah. Biden's has made it clear that if they attack Israel they risk annihilation and Lebanon faces insane levels of destruction. But there is a limit to how many people Israel and kill can injure in Gaza with impunity before Hezbollah decides to go to war anyway. I hope to god I'm wrong but it seems to me he fundamentally doesn't understand that.
I have a very dark, negativistic view of the world. I hope I'm wrong and he does cave. But the democrats have shown they don't even have an instinct for self-preservation. Could you say they have a death wish. It's possible (likely?) that the Gaza war goes all the way to election day. If Biden allows that - he flushes his 2024 bid right down the drain and the dems get crushed at the polls. "We gotta let Israel keep killing Palestians in Gaza and the West Bank" isn't an electoral winner and it's far too long to put on a bumper sticker anyway.