Image is a ball-and-stick model of a molecule of CL-20, alternatively known as hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane, taken from Wikipedia.
Much of this preamble is taken from this article.
CL-20 is the most deadly non-nuclear explosive that humanity has yet discovered, capable of generating detonation velocities and pressures higher than other military explosives like TNT, RDX, and HMX. If you have a more powerful explosive, you can make your missiles travel further and/or make them smaller. It also helps the creation of nuclear missiles, as to start the nuclear chain reaction, you need a powerful shockwave to get all the atoms in there to mingle. The problem is that it's a little too explosive, making it exceedingly difficult to not only manufacture, but transport. I mean, America can hardly transport some chemicals across the country without poisoning entire towns. Thus, it isn't really used in many known military applications.
In 1994, in China, Professor Yu Yongzhong synthesized the first CL-20 compound in his laboratory. America came along and said 'Actually, we did it first, in 1987.' The US team said that despite it being such a powerful explosive, the cost of making and testing it was too high, and the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that there wasn't really much interest in that kind of weapons arms race anymore. Production therefore fell to the wayside, while China kept at it, investing in its production and testing.
China has recently found a way to synthesize it to make it five times as shock-resistant. This shock resistance is essentially measured by dropping an object onto it and measuring the height you need to drop it from to make it explode. The previous record was 13 cm / 5 inches, whereas now it is 68 cm, or about 27 inches. US military experts already fear that China has designed its weaponry to use CL-20 and thus this will give them an advantage in missile technology.
(Also, fun fact, CL-20 is called that because it was developed in the China Lake facility in California.)
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Here is the archive of important pieces of analysis from throughout the war that we've collected.
This week's first update is here in the comments.
This week's second update is here in the comments.
This week's third update is here in the comments.
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
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. I recommend their map more than the channel at this point, as an increasing subscriber count has greatly diminished their quality.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have decent analysis. Avoid the comment section.
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. Beware of chuddery.
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 journalist reporting in the warzone.
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 ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist (but still quite reactionary in terms of gender and sexuality and race, so beware). 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 ~ Another 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's army.
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
The people complaining about "tankies" should be relentlessly compared to the people that complain about the "woke". The behaviour is two sides of the same coin, one performed by conservatives-only while the other is performed by both of them in unity against the only anti-capitalists.
Both are functionally meaningless, being undefined in any given situation so they can be thrown around in all places.
The liberals saying "tankie" will not like being compared with the conservatives in this way, and they certainly will not like tankie + woke being compared as the same thing. The interesting thing here is that "to be awake" applies more to the people getting called tankies (and I mean that for all in the anti-imperialist left) than to the nato lovers saying it.
I really feel inspired by this like it's exactly the right way to go about undermining it.
You're onto something here. Not to mention the way that tankies/"wokeism" lives absolutely rent-free in their heads. We all know people, online and in real life, who filter every piece of news or political thought through the lens of "despite what tankies / The Woke Left says", or "the tankies/woke libs wouldn't like this-". I'll be using that in the future, thank you
It's so incredibly similar it actually amazes me that it hasn't been thought of already. To push back against it we need to adopt the same methods of pushback as has occurred with the "woke" shit and to draw the similarities, then figure out what messaging works to upset the people using "tankie" the most when they're compared to the wokeism crowd.
We need some form of snappy/concise response that can be modified for various arguments easily. Pointing out how fucking stupid it is that they basically have the chud brainworms, just a bit to the left on the Overton scale, may be a good start. Not just going "No u" at someone yelling about tankies, but maybe even reaching a few of them mentally. Can we make at least a few of them reflect on how they're doing exactly what the chuds are doing?
One thing that infuriated me recently was a longtime friend saying "despite what Tankies say, NATO is a force for good. It prevented a general war in Europe for 70 years". I didn't engage, but I wonder how this example could be rephrased with the woke comparison. "Despite what the woke left says, ICE is a force for good. It's prevented an ISIS operative from sneaking into the USA for fifteen years" or something like that might work. Just rephrase it and regurgitate it.
deleted by creator
:stalin-feels-good: Perfect
I like this, this is good thinking
Good idea, but you know cliche libs will spit at you when you try that right? "Ur doing a whataboutism!!!" then they'll just smugly continue on punching left twice as hard as they would ever even think about punching right
"Whataboutism" is the perfect thought terminating cliche libs use whenever they feel attacked, regardless of whether it even makes any sense or not
Whataboutism doesn't fit, that's like if they said "tankies are evil" and you say "but what about nato?".
This isn't trying to make people question their hypocrisy it's just directly telling them that they're behaving exactly the same way the conservatives do, that they're an extremely similar kind of reactionary in behaviour that has created an ill-defined boogieman as their political enemy to filter their entire worldview through. That they spend all of their time trying to attack this boogieman instead of trying to improve the world.
I mean, i totally agree with your whole argument it's just that i know i've heard libs use the whataboutism charge for things that don't even make sense before, but still act like they dropped some nuclear debate bomb & act like they "won"
Maybe i'm wrong and this approach will gradually sink in & make them question things, probably would require widespread pushback in this vein every time they throw the "tankie" bullshit around
deleted by creator
Don’t even accuse them of anything. “Agree” with them. “Yeah man, I hate the woke libs too”
The Deprogram boys covered this in their recent tankie discourse episode (82). The whole episode is good and about this topic.
They mentioned woke specifically?
They essentially say that 'tankie' is just 'woke' but for democrats. Or well, maybe they literally say that, it's been a week or so since I've listened.
Hmm I just listened to it all and must have missed it, off the cuff short comment somewhere? Could have missed it while doing other stuff.
Neat that we're on the same page though, this is the right button to push on imo.
The Deprogram boys are quite good. They say some funny thing and since I don't use twitter, I can't tell if it's just a hexbear-ism or a young folk thing that's making the rounds. My head cannon is that they browse hexbear every so often (I think JT and Yugopnik both have accounts, afaik).