Image is of a protest in Pakistan after the attempted assassination of Imran Khan in November 2022.
What a clusterfuck of an election.
Imran Khan, the previous official Prime Minister of Pakistan, was removed by the command of the United States in April 2022 in a no confidence motion. This made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Imran Khan and his supporters have protested since then against the Pakistani state, which is more-or-less governed by the military despite the furnishings of civilian rule. This has ranged from largely peaceful protests to trying to burn down and occupy houses and headquarters.
It was assumed by the Pakistani elite that they could make the problem go away by arresting Imran Khan and effectively forcing many PTI candidates to run as independents while hounding them with police raids and stopping them from campaigning - and adding salt on the wound by disabling social media access and mobile services on the day of the election to make it more difficult to co-ordinate. Fortunately, these people don't seem to quite understand how the internet works in the current day, and so Khan's supporters started up WhatsApp groups and improvised websites and apps to spread the word about which candidates to vote for, leading to Khan's party getting the plurality, though not the majority, of votes in the election.
This has created a rather depressed mood in the Pakistani elite. A coalition of eight parties joined together, obviously excluding the PTI, but this coalition is shaky and lacks much legitimacy, with two major parties inside it, the PML-N and PPP, being ideologically opposed on several issues. It has been regarded as "the coalition of losers" by Khan's supporters. The new Prime Minister is Shehbaz Sharif, who also ruled from April 2022 until August 2023 and is the younger brother of Nawaz Sharif, who served as Prime Minister three times before in the last few decades. With inflation at 30% and the economy greatly struggling, there are fears that things may only stay together for months, not years, before the coalition fragments and something else has to be done.
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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 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. - 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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
I have not had any success whatsoever in budging libs on anything related to the current administration. Trump justifies everything. They don't know about the genocide in Yemen. They're very concerned about Russia and China. They cannot imagine any political action other than voting and at this point it's purely a comfort blanket to save them from Trump.
I know it doesn't seem like it but not all of them are the same, society isn't as polarized as it claims to be, it's an illusion! Okay cards on the table I've only convinced one lib to not vote Joe and they were family and they were already using the g word about gaza.. still I fancy myself a lib whisperer and am therefore hyper qualified to give advice so, what you need to do is become them a bit first, rotate your talent for disagreeableness into finely honed debate skills, squint your eyes and imagine the eggs benedict and mimosas they shove to you at the crack of 11am is harmless pizza and whiskey, now you're catching on good job
you see this a lot on the more socdem or even vaguely socialist subreddits that I visit once every week or two to gauge reactions to ongoing events. there's a ton of genuine panic about things and basically every day there's a post like "okay, but even if you thought voting didn't do anything you'd STILL be wrong because... insert five paragraphs here" because I think people are starting to sink beneath the waves, either economically or socially, and are frantically grabbing onto anything within reach. It's a natural reaction to the threat of drowning that I can't deeply fault them for but it's very difficult to convey to people who are in that state that the levers that they're trying to pull at to change things simply aren't connected to anything anymore, and haven't been for... I mean, at least since Reagan.
If anybody's ever played or watched the Stanley Parable, it's like the ending where the protagonist is just stuck inside a facility that's about to blow up and they're trying to push buttons in a panic because some combination has to stop the sequence, and the narrator is mocking them for even trying, and it inevitably doesn't work and the facility explodes. the buttons work about as much as voting does; it makes you feel like you're doing something rather than nothing as you careen towards oblivion, because you can see no other possible method of escape. it is actually pretty remarkable how deeply the anti-communist instinct is programmed that even when these utterly desperate situations come along, many (but not all, of which many of us here are proof!) still go "no, that's impossible, actually it would be even worse than if this entire building blew up with me inside it, I'm just gonna go back to frantically pressing buttons that I am perfectly aware do nothing whatsoever." learned helplessness, I suppose.
When the libs say "The leftists are telling everyone not to vote because they believe that the revolution is magically going to happen because to them it's the rapture because they're unrealistic children", while they're trying to vote their way out of inescapable fascism while denouncing any other action as ridiculous, childish, impossible, or worse than fascism. It's really pathetic, and it hurts seeing people you would want to be able to actually reason and think and make plans falling back on, more or less, religious fanaticism to save them instead of human agency. They don't think any action is possible so they're offering up blood sacrifices to the American Civil Religion because surely the institutions will save them?