The Great Housing Mission of Venezuela, launched in 2011 by Hugo Chavez, is the most ambitious housing project in the country's history. This week, the 4,600,000th house was built, with a goal for 5 million homes by 2024 and beyond. The program has built 1,255 residential complexes on a total of 9,837 hectares, an area equivalent to six times the Swiss city of Geneva.
The program additionally provides social infrastructure like schools, subsidized food markets, and recreational and green spaces. Over 70% of constructions are self-managed by communities, with financial and logistics support from the government. Communities also provide each other with materials - from each according to their supplies, to each according to their needs. Russian, Chinese, and Belarusian companies have helped supply the program over the years.
In Antímano Parish in southwestern Caracas, a group of predominantly women came together in 2015 and trained in construction, cleared land, and then built apartments while under the pressure of food and materials shortages and electricity blackouts due to the United States' sanctions campaign.
Claudia Tisoy, a mother and self-trained plumber, said “This goes beyond building homes for our families, we are also building the future of our country, with women leading the way. This is what the socialist horizon is all about.”VA
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
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
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
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 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
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.
This is going to get worse, and it will turn those queer citizens of the Global South into Western fifth columnists, further perpetuating the cycle of queerness being "Western decadence." I think the only reason why the West is faux progressive at all is because the West figured out how to weaponize queer rights as pinkwashing. Why do you think the acceptance towards queer rights happened so suddenly? That's when pinkwashing became a thing. The corollary is as soon as pinkwashing is no longer useful to empire, there will be a massive reactionary backlash as queer people are hung out to dry by their "allies."
I also suspect much of the spearhead towards queer rights in the Global South is headed by Western NGOs that purposefully set up the queer natives for failure. I'll use China as an example. The go-to pronoun used by many Chinese enbies is TA, which is just the pinyin of the third person pronoun. I believe they were set up for failure because if you were some Chinese person skeptical of queerness being "Western decadence," then the fact that a bunch of people use Western letters instead of Chinese characters to describe themselves would pretty much confirm your skepticism. Instead of using different Chinese characters like 祂 or even coming up with a new Chinese character, they resorted to using the Western alphabet. There is also a source of division since TA isn't the pinyin of the third person pronoun, but the pinyin of the third person pronoun in Mandarin. Most of the major topolects like Cantonese and Shanghainese have completely different third person pronouns, so by saying TA, you're imposing Mandarin pronouns on Cantonese/Shanghainese/Hakka speakers, which is another pressure point the West can use to divide China. Chinese characters were came up by the Chinese people to do, among other things, smooth over topolectical differences. I absolutely do not think it was an accident TA propagated.
All this is to say outside of rare cases like Cuba where its social progressivism is truly sincere and was natively sprung forth from their socialist society, most progressivism in the Global South is purposefully build by Western NGOs on sand that is designed to turn the marginalized communities into fifth columnists for the West once the reactionary backlash inevitably happens.
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她 was coined by Liu Bannong who had been educated in the West. He used it in his poems. At around this time, there definitely were plenty of intellectuals who had lost faith in the Chinese culture and wanted the complete Europeanization of China à la Japan, but I don't think 她 is an example. Anyway, reactionaries obviously don't have a genuine nostalgia for the past - they just want other people to suffer.
By the way, the weaponisation of queer rights rights against the periphery dovetails nicely with how queer rights are weaponised at home against minorities, giving liberals an excuse to be racist.
In Denmark queer acceptance and gender equality are considered part and parcel of the "Danish values" that Muslims and other non-white minorities are being beaten over the head with and their alleged lack of these "values" are being used to smear these minorities as being "medieval" and "uncivilised".
It goes without saying that the people who are the most frothing about muslim homophobia are themselves the ones who are the most indifferent or hostile to queer rights, once the racial element is removed from the equation.
What a mystery.