Well, Iran and their allies’ response may happen sometime this week and apparently they aren’t talking to the US in order to negotiate how and where they will hit Israel (and Shoigu arrived in Tehran rather auspiciously), the Bangladeshi government just fell, F16s have been given to Ukraine, there are fascist riots in the UK, and Japan just had its worst stock fall since 1987 and seems to be taking several other countries/corporations with it. I don’t really know where to look right now.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Iraq! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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The bulletins site is here!
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Last week’s thread is here.
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 honestly don’t understand what the US obsession with low-ROI government spending is. Like, it’s not that hard to spend money so that a dollar in leads to multiple dollars in future cost savings or multiple dollars in economic growth.
I guess it’s because the US doesn’t price in the cost of healthcare? Maybe the zero-sum global perspective? The high cost of war?
Build a subway. Build climate mitigation infrastructure. Plant trees. Feed children. Give people doctors. Education for all. There’s this whole individualist “fuck you got mine” mentality that seems to completely stall progress in the US and blows up the cost of doing anything that benefits other people to the point of it not being worthwhile.
I want to say it’s because everything is commodified in capitalism. Build a subway, people buy less cars. Have public healthcare, health and insurance stonks go down. Build affordable housing, the real estate market sees a dip in the price of their holdings.
There’s more profit to be made from establishing monopolies than from innovating. The Roman Empire started because Rome was conveniently situated on a major river crossing and able to extract taxes not because they were the descendants of Trojan warriors, and their empire was built as they sought increasingly large taxation fiefdoms.
Capitalism kind of worked, building a “middle class” of relatively wealthy workers, during the period where there was at least some degree of workers power via the labor movement and the influence of unions in left-leaning social democracy and it’s been catastrophically rapacious ever since the power of unions collapsed. Which is to say capitalism works better the more you limit how much capitalism there is and it seemed to work best in the Soviet Union when it was limited to the margins of garden markets and self-employed tradespeople in the ussr.
Profit
I dunno what else to tell you. The US gov has different priorities because workers do not have power to turn the state towards its interests. Healthcare is where it’s at because it’s profitable, subways aren’t built except by weird public-private boondongles because that’s the way to extract more profit. American workers do not have a say in how the government is run in any meaningful way. And American workers also have very low militancy and organization for a lot of reasons (they imprison or kill anyone with some militancy and ability to organize).
Sometimes people get in their heads that voting gives them power, but it doesn’t. Leaders are unaccountable to organizations or voters, there’s no recalls, and there’s so many ways of diffusing responsability for actions if you want to as an American politician. People sometimes vote once every couple years and think that’s democracy or worker power.
If you want subways and housing and climate mitigation and healthcare, it will not come without some kind of revolution - this time there is no big bad USSR to show there are alternatives to bourgeois capitalist “democracy” and the rate of profit is so low there can be no more inefficiencies like public works programs.
I have more than one person in my life who are single issue voters, and their issue is “taxes”. They see the government spending money and they think that is money being stolen out of their pocket. They will feign a bit of anger of how much the government spends on the military but when you talk about infrastructure or anything else that helps people, that’s what gets their blood boiling. It’s ultimately rooted in hatred of the poor, who they see as “freeloading” off “their” money. It’s not rational but it’s how a lot of Americans see the world.