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.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
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.
Who called it ~2 months ago in the mega that as we get closer to election, more electoralism would sprout up? Was a great comment.
Edit: I didn’t mean to imply that simply talking about the election is bad
I think it’s a pretty natural urge to chip in and give your two cents on it; this website, and the news megathread in particular, has always been biased towards what is getting media coverage. I think we’re a little better about it than more liberal spaces because most if not all of us are internationalist communists and are more capable of caring about issues beyond a single country, but if something going on isn’t receiving media attention then it’ll very probably also not get much attention here (this is one of the major reasons why I introduced the COTW system). The inverse is also true. News mega regulars will be familiar with having a dozen comments within five minutes of a big electoral event happening, and other times somebody will come along and be like “Uhhh, there’s some really big shit going down in Tajikistan and I haven’t seen anybody talk about it?” and it turns out that the country’s been on fire for a month and nobody here noticed.
Not sure what to do about it, really. One could remove all comments about electoralism, American and otherwise, from the news mega within a certain time period of the election (say, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year) but elections are very big deals both politically and geopolitically and it would be silly to ignore them. All those comments would probably just be made elsewhere because people would still want to talk about it, which either the general megathread would have to pick up, or an electoralism quarantine megathread would have to be made. Perhaps that would be fine, maybe even good, just for the week of the election - but having an explicit space to post about electoralism for months or years kinda defeat the purpose of wanting less discussion about it.
I think we will have to make a contaiment megathread for the week of the election, because last time they filled up the general mega and nowdays i think we have more users, plus we are federated and are way more actived, also during important events the sites gets a spike in users that that to post about it
also just wanted to post this pic i found from old times
We talk about the elections in Venezuela, we talk about the elections in the UK, we talk about the elections in France, and no one bats an eye about any of it. But talk about the elections in the US, and suddenly everyone feels the need to post their takes about electoralism.
The elections in the US are news and will have global consequences.
I didn’t mean to imply simply talking about it was bad, just genuine support.
Lol it’s always like this. I run a somewhat large, vaguely political discord/subreddit that has been around since 2016. Huge swaths of dumb nerds saying they were communist/anarchist absolutely blew a gasket at people who weren’t voting lol it was wild. The same people, me included, said we were going to do this for years. People just get swept up in it and next thing you know it’s the most important election of all time ™ again.
It was the same during chapo’s peak. Back then the first time twenty something voters could be forgiven.
A coconut rolling downhill gains speed
You will be hard pressed to find anyone here now or through November who is voting for Harris. Four years ago, there were very very few people here who were going to vote for Biden (this is a hill I will die on - people remember a couple random libs who might of waltzed in here but since day one at a minimum >95% of our users are anti-electoralism. We should always practice self-crit but supporting electoralism has never been a problem here).
But whatever, the presidential election is a big deal objectively and I have never been able to shake my interest in politics as a sport. Right now I’m genuinely a little surprised that the DNC has actually displayed a modicum of competence over the last 6 weeks or so. Interesting to see is all, doesn’t mean I’m voting for them. Equally surprised at how awful the Trump campaign has been in that same timeframe.
Wow, that’s wild, who could have predicted the news mega would be talking about the election in the global hegemon?!
Its not like we had two elections where that happened, right? Because the american left learned from it right??
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yeah, like, without an actual campaign where hundreds of thousands of votes can be held back unless Biden/Kamala commits to XYZ, it really doesn’t matter either way imo. without that campaign, it’s merely whatever your conscience tells you to do.
if anybody commenting/lurking here is going to vote for Kamala then like, whatever, you do you. maybe you live in a swing state and your vote might actually matter and you fear what Trump might do. I get it. my only request is that nobody spends hours upon hours talking about it as if it’s the ultimate expression of democratic power, and nobody pretends it’s going to meaningfully fix anything. it is a near-meaningless act in the core of a decaying, genocidal, imperialist empire.
I did not vote for Keir Starmer over here because my conscience would not allow me to put my name down next to policies I fundamentally disagree with up to and including genocide, and I made sure to not think or talk about the election despite everybody talking about it, because it was meaningless. thinking about it or talking about it inherently gives it some value; if you spend four hours every day arguing with people online about how much the election doesn’t matter then it probably does matter to you, just in a different way than you’re imagining, because you’re devoting precious hours out of your limited time on this earth to talk about it.
Many such things