Image is of the Cuban flag and the Pride flag on the Havana Health Ministry building.
Inspired by a highly upvoted recommendation by @Commiejones@hexbear.net:
We need to kill the Mega Posting Wars meme. It wasn't very funny to start with and now I get the feeling some people are taking it way too seriously. Clogging up the news thread with bullshit just to try to out post the trans mega is just dumb and annoying.
The News Megathread is now under trans martial law:
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Loving trans people on this site and elsewhere is strictly mandatory.
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Posting about the "comment wars" between the trans and news megathreads is now strongly discouraged inside the news megathread. No shame in it - I also recently made jokes about it - but though they were almost always just jokes, it was unrelated to current events and was beginning to feel more like padding the comment count instead of trying to improve the quality of the thread. If you want to boost comments and engagement here, then post articles and analysis!
The COTW (Chemical of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific chemical every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied chemicals. If you've wanted to talk about the chemical 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 Chemicals of the Week are Estrogen and Testosterone! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.
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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.
Question for smarter people in the news-mega: If israel succeeded in triggering a regional war and drew the US into some direct conflict, would that be a good or bad time for China and DPRK to make some extremely strong (aggressive, maybe even invasive) moves regarding Taiwan and South Korea? US empire spreading thin, y'know ...
not smart here. dprk is ridiculous, its some western brainpan idea. Why would they start shit? It wont make anything better for them in long or short term. Attacking population bigger than yours in offensive war to get what, exactly?
Taiwan seems silly as well
only low bloodshed option is very sudden and very massive paratrooper operation, as i see it, sea route is very visible, and it still would be dumb, even if they accomplish primary goal (as they'll get exploded tsmc, mad gamers and ai bros across the world, probably blocked straits, and very unhappy local population)
well, part of the calculus here would be how hard that population actually wants to fight, and how strong and or/corrupt their military actually is. Seems to me a lot of south koreans really fucking hate their country right now, especially women. Does that mean they would be sympathetic to the DPRK? I don't know enough to say. I do think at the very least it would make them unlikely to throw themselves into voluntary service. I don't really know anything about their relative military strengths. Additionally, how loyal are their highest military members? could some of them be bribed in some way to sabotage the south korean military? Literally no way for any of us to know that. As far as what they have to gain: materially, the number one thing is if they could make the war quick and relatively damage light they would gain a ton of arable land, which they have desperately needed for a long time. It also would get Americans out of the peninsula, greatly enhancing their security. Finally, reunification has been a political goal of theirs since the ceasefire, it would greatly enhance their legitimacy to be the sole leader of the penisula.
Now, does this mean they actually will restart the war that never technically ended? Like I said, I don't think any of us have enough information to know, but one thing is that they did recently explicitly say that peaceful reunification is now impossible, and there was some propaganda about dprk recalling students for "indoctrination" (not even going to link it, it was a RFA piece if i remember correctly), which i normally would dismiss out of hand, but anecdotally there was a couple of people I followed on twitter who claimed to be from the DPRK that said they were either leaving twitter or going back home to dprk right around the time this was said to be happening. I dont know if there's a way to verify these accounts or if they could have been part of some long game just for this propaganda piece or some bs like that, but assuming they were real, If the DPRK was making any plans to go to/prepare for war in some fashion, I would think that recalling anyone living abroad unless absolutely necessary under some pretense would be a move they would do in preparation.
That's why you gotta wait a couple to a few years to start some shit.
Let them waste their supplies on some bs conflict--> start another conflict--> let them waste more of their supplies on that new conflict--> repeat this until the west has been burned out.
Every subsequent conflict gets easier since the previous one wasted their time, money, and resources while also giving the other side time to prepare.
Like how our ancestors would hunt the god damn mammoths
instant nuke
It would be a good time but I’m not holding my breath. China is the epitome of nothing ever happens
From the perspective of opposing the US, it actually makes more sense for the PRC to be ambiguous over Taiwan instead of resolving that ambiguity by overthrowing the ROC. That's one thing a lot of people miss. The PRC doesn't actually gain a whole lot by explicitly taking over Taiwan instead of what they're doing right now which is quietly integrating Taiwan's economy with the rest of China to the point where the Taiwanese bourgeoisie has to do what the CPC tells them to do as well as bribing various ROC military officers to lay down their arms should an invasion happen.
Within Taiwan itself, there's a massive political scandal going on right now where the head of the third party is being prosecuted on corruption charges. Additional context:
This third party, the TPP, is officially neither pro-separatist nor pro-status quo. It's uncharacteristically agnostic on inter-Strait relations.
The TPP has the zoomer vote completely locked down. And it's not just voter age zoomers, but zoomers who are still too young to vote. Before the arrival of the TPP, the youth vote was supposed to go to the DPP, the pro-separatist party, but now the DPP is seen as the party of millennials and gen x. KMT continues to be filled with boomers.
Conscription is mandatory in the ROC, so now you have a situation where people of conscription age are more likely to support a party whose head is facing corruption charges.
Every party is more or less corrupt. Both the KMT and DPP are corrupt as fuck. In fact, the official reason why the TPP formed was their claim that the DPP has airs of a progressive party but is largely a corrupt party that doesn't do shit outside of gesturing towards Taiwanese separatism and fearmonger about the KMT selling out Taiwan to get the separatist vote.
The DPP currently has the presidency with basically no political mandate while they don't have control in the Legislative Yuan, which is controlled by a coalition between the KMT and TPP.
The TPP is completely centralized over its head Ko Wen-je.
To put this all together, Ko Wen-je is facing corruption charges because the DPP is threatened by the TPP's ability to attract the zoomer vote, and the DPP hopes that by ending Ko's political career, they can sink the TPP, which is completely reliant on Ko as a central figure. In other words, the DPP is just conducting lawfare over their political rivals. As for the corruption charges itself, he probably was corrupt but not any more corrupt than everyone else.
Given all this, there's no real reason for the PRC to overthrow the ROC. Taiwanese society continues to be divided, and Taiwanese politics continues to be a circus where nothing gets fucking done. Pro reunification sentiment is very low now, but it'll change the more the PRC advances and the more the ROC continues to stagnate. Some formally pro-separatist influencers are already jumping ship to be at least anti-separatist.
Never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake.