Image is of Iranian missiles flying over the Knesset, the Israeli parliament building in Jerusalem.
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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.
When people meet Senators and House Reps, they come away with wildly different impressions. Some people come away thinking, “oh thank God that competent person is running that committee” (libs think this), others “Fuck that evil competent imperialist running that committee”, others, “wow that person is just a fool”.
They’re usually a little of all the above. Some are particularly competent or incompetent, malicious or just foolish, but most are a mix. They’re “good” at some things, bad at most other things, and choose to do evil both knowingly and explicitly and knowingly due to deliberate incuriosity. They get into the habit of lying to their constituents because honestly answering hard questions might tank their next campaign. They learn who butters their bread very quickly and tell themselves that despite being sellouts if they weren’t in office it would be someone worse. And of course some are purely self-interested and don’t care about the politics or ethics at all.
Anyways, there are House Reps and Senators that do have a much better understanding. They tend to chair or play second fiddle to the chair on the committees most relevant to funding for the imperial apparatus and manufacturing consent for war, sanctions, etc. They get their understanding from years of intel briefings and dodging hard questions from their constituents. They’re not experts, and don’t need to be - their benefit to the system is to do as they’re told - but they do actually know that when they press the sanctions button it means dead children and when they bring home the MIC bacon to their district it’s for offensive military actions. They know that escalation is not defense and that they’re carrying out an effort to meet strategic goals that hurt other people in order to benefit US business interests. And they’ll fight you to the death if you threaten their career.
I think about something Matt Taibbi said a few years back about the House specifically - that the House is a place where surprisingly small amounts of money can buy you a congressperson’s campaign, and so as a result very many of the House reps are know-nothing dipshits who were chosen by some bourgeois dickhead from their district and bankrolled to go to DC and push whatever the bourgeois buyers’ pet project, or federal contract is. As long as they vote “yes” on whatever porkbarrel thing the money in their district bankrolled them to do, they’re golden, and the rest of the time it doesn’t matter to their constituent (singular) what they do. So it’s a more likely that a House member is going to be a useless dipshit whose only real job is to vote in a particular way on a particular thing and otherwise they’re just not very bright people.
The key is that there’s variation, it’s not just one thing. The way in which there’s one thing is that capital pressures all of them, but they can range from a lever-pulling fool to a competent technocrat intentionally helping the imperial machine.
AOC is surely incompetent in many ways but she is also cynical and playing on “left” language to do her thing. That’s not being a lever-pulling idiot. And she’s been in the neighborhood of intelligence for some time.
Oh yeah, I’m not saying they’re all idiots - just that House members are more likely to be muppets than Senators. AOC is at bare minimum a climbing lanyard ghoul, and probably worse than that.
Yeah 100%. The house is for the pleb political class, lots are incompetent fail children that grab a few corporate sponsors and ride them the whole way.
This was literally exactly what Madison Cawthorne was, except that guy was so fucking stupid and bigoted that he couldn’t even be bothered to show up for the votes the local landlord coalition paid him to show up for.
He just killed his position for clout then immediately got his leash yanked back and they euthanized him after one term. Can’t even show his face in this district anymore and had to move to Florida.
And so it goes right down to the local level, but instead of the “make war” button, they have the “unleash the cops” (murder homeless people) button, and instead of the “sanctions” button, they have the “defund anything that isn’t a private subsidy” (destroy schools) button.