Imagine a terrifying world where we are all ruled by monsters of every stripe. And not hot ones like werewolves, but instead decaying zombies and mummies who are both insensitive to, and actively benefit from the immense suffering they cause on a daily basis. The top echelon of society, filled with profit-seeking, bloodsucking vampires. And the worst of it is that they repeat on a daily basis that what they are doing is not only just, but there is no other possible way to do it.
Pretty spooky, right? What if I told you that this world... was our own?
Happy Halloween!
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Lebanon! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
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/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/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.
... I would rate EI as mostly factual in reporting despite the use of excellent sourcing in most articles and left biased based on story selection and wording that sometimes amounts to propaganda such as this: No hope, no future, only revenge.
A factual search reveals they have not formally failed a fact check.
Overall, we rate Electronic Intifada Left biased based on strong pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli bias. We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting, rather than High, due to a lack of transparency regarding funding, as well as strongly loaded emotional wording that may be misleading.
It's ironic that these liberal assessments always see having a clear point of view, openly presented to a readership, as some kind of mark against the integrity of a news source, whilst cloaking and disguising what are often extremely ingrained biases and world views in beneath rhetoric of absolute impartiality is treated as a positive. It really belies what the liberal state sees as the function of news; to create and present a hegemonic reality for the public, rather than presenting them with clear and honest arguments and letting them make up their own minds.
That is such a garbage site...of course liberals are always throwing it at my face, although the site has been proven to peddle biased BS several times themselves, and have no actual methodology whatsoever. It's literally some brainwormed American arbitrarily slapping labels. According to this guy, the CNN is this very leftist media outlet, which if pushed little bit more to the left, would end up rebranding as the Marxist News Network.
Interestingly enough, the Media Bias Fact Check web site looks so bad, it might get confused with marxists.org...