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.
My understanding: a lot of migrant workers died constructing the world cup stadiums under extremely unsafe working conditions, to also they recently banned alcohol for regular fans at the upcoming world cup, but not for fifa big whigs and other upper crust pig types.
@jackmarxist might be saying "Why specifically be anti-Qatar when there's plenty of awful fucking countries and corporations and people that redditors are huge fans of?" in which case it's probably some kind of Western bot initiative in response to Qatar aligning more with Russia geopolitically than the West.
But I don't think that's necessarily the main factor, you're probably right on the money, there's been a lot of controversy about Qatar even before the war started and it's a continuation of that controversy.
There being an uproar now is kind of predictable in how late it is. There are a lot of factors.
Qatar was decided 12 years ago in a vote that has been proven to have been totally corrupt. In the bid they said they were gonna have it in the summer and use some technology™ to cool the stadiums
It was then moved to the winter, fucking up the regular league seasons and making the players more susceptible to injury due to fatigue
A lot of the fan accommodation has not been built. They suddenly banned the consumption of beer in the stadiums, pray for the brits!
This is just stuff I remember and is without mentioning the human rights stuff which kind of goes without saying.
Fun fact that the USA was the runner up in the voting, imagine if the world cup had been held in the USA during the summer. Would there have been the same uproar due to US human rights abuses? At least in the US there is the (crumbling) infrastructure to have such an event.
There definitely is a racist element, to be fair.
Like they do treat migrant workers very poorly, but that French political cartoon was just direct anti-Arab/Muslim bigotry.
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and ya know, that some of the stadiums being used at this world cup were designed by Albert Speer Jr.