I'm having increasing difficulty maintaining the time and energy to put into these updates, especially after having moved. My earlier rhetoric about doing this until the war ended (or past that) sounds increasingly foolish now that the war won't be won, militarily at least, for many months longer. I'm also returning to academia soon, which will keep me very busy, and also want to get back to reading theory more, as I've had less time for that, and my reading list is building up.
My choices are thus:
a) fully 'hit da bricks' and stop the updates and the megathreads (presumably somebody would take over posting them, at least while the war continued);
b) stop the updates but maintain the megathreads, posting some of the most important pieces (e.g. from MoA, Naked Capitalism, etc) I find in a few times per day;
c) maintain the updates and the megathreads, but prune the updates to the point where I'm essentially just posting headlines. And might mean that I also couldn't post summaries as, well, I'm not really reading the articles (and the difference between the update and the summary would be fairly negligible anyway).
I don't think the first option is necessary, but I also don't know how useful the third option would be to people. Like, this isn't (just) some kind of self-actualization exercise for me to know more about the news, nor a blog really, it's meant to be a resource. But I'm fine with doing just the headlines, it would take like an hour every day which is a time investment I'm comfortable with. The debate I'm having with myself is whether, at that point, if I'm really filling a niche - i.e. if there are better resources if all you want are the important headlines.
So I'm split between b) and c), essentially.
But for now...
Here is November 14th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary!
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists, for the “buh Zeleski is a jew?!?!” people.
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ Gleb Bazov, banned from Twitter, referenced pretty heavily in what remains of pro-Russian Twitter.
https://t.me/asbmil ~ ASB Military News, banned from Twitter.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster - crowd-funded U.S journalist, mostly pro-Russian, works on the ground near warzones to report news and talk to locals.
https://t.me/riafan_everywhere ~ Think it's a government news org or Federal News Agency? Russian language.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Front news coverage. Russian langauge.
https://t.me/rybar ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
With the entire western media sphere being overwhelming pro-Ukraine already, you shouldn't really need more, but:
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.
Last week's discussion post.
I see :reddit-logo: has decided to simply pretend that the missile was Russian despite the US claiming it was Ukrainian, very cool.
The feds must love it when the people they've conditioned go above and beyond the official narrative to even more warmongering territory. Gonna make the rehabilitation and re-education when the empire crumbles more difficult though
It is quite possible that the brainwashing conditions people to cheer like clapping sea lions for those in power more than instill any deep commitment to liberal-conservative ideology. In the event of a successful communist revolution (:inshallah-script: ) I don't consider it entirely impossible that a lot of the redditor types would flip 180 degrees and be just as militantly uncritical in favour of the new regime.
Nah, they’re non-ideological but their loyalty lies in American institutions. A revolutionary movement that threatens those institutions is anathema to the American political immune system. This is why the DSA grew as much as it did and real revolutionary orgs get black bagged. This is also my pitch behind a future US communism that somehow maintains the original constitution with like 100 amendments tacked onto it. Pure american brainworms
That one idea to do Communism in America by just giving everyone military benefits makes sense in this light.
Starting a socialism with american characteristics movement that’s entirely petty bourgeois
Instead of bunkers, everyone gets a fake jetski dealership they can pretend to run.
Yeah, it legitimately concerns me how utterly brainwashed so many people seem to be, people I know have been completely contradicting their previously firmly held beliefs because they've consumed nothing but mainstream media, disturbing shit.
I think you need to understand that it isn't going to happen. Balkanization must occur before anything like that, severe deprivation and collapse of living standards, millions unemployed, likely a couple of generations of illiteracy, will be required to collapse the Western narrative, it there ever is such a collapse. If the U.S. is anything it is very few people on very rich land, so any affects that are felt by the world are felt by us last by design.
:covid-cool:
Our rates were bad, but the death rates in the 'global south' were worse, because the vaccine rollout was heavily delayed by first world vaccine scalpers, and their propoganda machines are not as sophisticated as ours are to deal with the fallout. They get the back end of the propoganda, but everything is aiming right at us, no matter your political spectrum it is easy to find people who will create excuses for empire.
Oh I'm in no way implying the global south (sans China) didn't suffer badly from covid, merely pointing out that the empire couldn't avoid taking heavy losses from the plague as well
True, but my point was that we do have the media landscape to to bear such losses, which make up for our lack of adaptable medical infrastructure. If anything this entire thing (with the mild success of the Democrats in the midterm) has shown the effectiveness of the media in the coup that has been pulled. The question is what can break it? And that is my point is that it will take more than a simple pandemic, it may take the literal inability to process written propoganda for a couple generations to rid the U.S. of Western brainworms. Other countries don't usually have the ability to distort reality in that way, therefore they and their governments 'feel' the effects of crisis more strongly.