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.
Is Greta a communist, an Islamist or a Putinist? Or is she the embodiment of this new axis of evil?
It is ridiculous how angry they are at her. I get why you could call Putin or Hamas evil for killing people. Xi is the leader of a rising superpower who is undoing western hegemony so I understand why he could be evil and scary in the minds of chuds. But Greta? What has she ever done besides saying we shouldn't burn the planet down? I get why reactionaries would be annoyed with her but placing her next to world leaders and organised militias seems like a wild overreaction.
I feel like Greta is a comrade at heart but the establishment has gotten her a bunch of radlib (crypto fascist) friends to keep her from realizing her power level.
It's an old school paywall bypassing technique; it usually doesn't work anymore, no. But it's sometimes worth a try. Especially when you see google managed to index an image for example but you can't access it; means there was a way the crawler managed it without an account in the first place. Sometimes it's an IP whitelist, sometimes they opened the article up just long enough to get indexed, more often these days they go through one of the awful google-provided ways to do it securely, but sometimes it's indeed the user-agent.
Neocolonialism - During the cold war we fought communism, later Islamism. And latest Putinism. Now they're joining forces.
Comrades at war
If someone should have forgotten that pogrom is a Russian word they were reminded last Sunday when hundreds of young combative men stormed the airport in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan in Russia, with the sole purpose of lynching Jews.
This display of brainworms comes from the weekly newspaper "Weekendavisen" which positions itself as a media outlet for the educated reactionary. It intersperses conservative vitriol with a pretty ambitious coverage of fine culture and science, all of it with the highest word count of any Danish media outlet. It is not a paper for finance bros but rather for senior bureaucrats, principals and professional academics.