Image is sourced from this Guardian article.
The Pope’s fucking dead.
He gave JD Vance three chocolate easter eggs, exchanged pleasantries for 17 minutes, and then keeled over and died.
What a way to go.
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.
So a bunch of far-right groupings, including a small but old far-right party called “Ergue-te” (which means “Rise up”) scheduled a protest that would happen at the Martim Moniz plaza where they would march there and roast a pig, literally. Now, a lot of immigrants hang out and live there including from muslim countries so obviously this is supposed to be a provocation but, just to explain how dumb this is, if someone here is ever in Lisbon check out the plaza, it’s pretty much just a tourist spot, mostly because it’s outside a metro station and there are a lot foreign food restaurants around it, but aside from some subcontinent dudes hanging out in the garden just chilling, it’s really not that different from most of Lisbon and honestly it’s a place I always recommend to people who visit. So the whole thing is the far-right playing up xenophobic sentiments around people specifically from that region of the world, a lot of which do immigrate to Portugal for seasonal and other low-wage work.
So, because they asked for permission to protest the police had to evaluate whether they could do so safely so that the mayor’s office could approve it. At first, the police gave the ok, then when obviously they realized there would be a bunch of counter protests they backed out and gave the “Not ok”, so the Mayor unauthorized the protest. Now if this had been the far-right Chega party organizing this protest, that would be the end of it, they’d stick to yelling about how the government doesn’t even let you publicly roast a pig, they’re pretty politically astute unfortunately.
But these guys are extra crazy so they decided to hold the protest anyway, and in a rare sight, after pretty clearly provoking both the counter-protestors AND the police who were there to keep the counter-protestors from caving their heads in, well…
Some got smacked, some got detained and some got arrested.
To show how blatant this thing was, here’s a clip of one of these guys caught on camera, pretty clearly infiltrating the counter-protest to start a fight and rile everybody up.
Probably obvious what the videos contain, but maybe content warning those videos [police violence] or something, I wasnt ready to see a cop smack someone in the head, imo its different than seeing them get hit by antfas which i was hoping for lol