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Bulletins and News Discussion from May 20th to May 26th, 2024 - Never Break TrueAnon's Rules For Life - COTW: Azerbaijan

Image is of Azerbaijan's President, Aliyev (left) and Armenia's President, Pashinyan (right) in a meeting a month or two after Azerbaijan took Nagorno-Karabakh.

  1. Never go to a second location.
  2. Always get the interior ministry post.
  3. Never get in a helicopter or any small aircraft.
  4. If someone with a gun enters your car, they’re gonna kill you.
  5. If someone tells you they’re not going to kill you, they’re calming you down to kill you later.
  6. Never give up your nukes.
  7. Never release the opposition's political prisoners.
  8. Never let the opposition delay elections.
  9. If someone starts to get into German runes, drop them.
  10. Never trust a South American with a German name.
  11. Never move anywhere for a religion.
  12. Never go into the sewers unless you’re a sewer guy.
  13. If someone’s trying to get you to commit a crime, they're FBI (sometimes CIA or military intelligence).
  14. Never become an FBI informant.
  15. If you do become an FBI informant, record everything.
  16. Never relinquish your arms.
  17. Always get it in writing.
  18. If you keep gambling, you’ll eventually win.
  19. Never talk to cops without a lawyer.
  20. Always pay your mercenaries.
  21. Don’t let anyone take your passport.

To add an addendum to rule 3, never put your President and Foreign Minister in the same helicopter or small aircraft. Especially if doing so in bad weather conditions. Especially if you're already under threat from a hostile nuclear power in the region with a proclivity for terrorism (though this probably isn't Israel's doing, in this particular case).

Anyway, Azerbaijan. Not a great country, I think. Did some genocides. They're a petrostate that is hosting Cop29, which I suppose is a way for the bourgeoisie to implicitly convey their contempt for the green movement. They got weapons from Israel, too.

Just for the record, there's an Iranian province called East Azerbaijan, which is not the same as Azerbaijan.

The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.

The Country of the Week is Azerbaijan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.

1.3K comments

  • Didn’t know someone could deserve worse than hell

    For context: “ Israeli occupation soldiers filmed themselves setting fire to the library at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City, which housed a valuable scholarly collection built up over many years.”

  • Looks like Ireland, Slovenia, Norway and Spain will all officially recognise the State of Palestine tomorrow. Not often we get positive news from Nazi Europe, so I'm happy about this.

  • We are self-deprecating and irony poisoned enough, time for a bit of an antidote.

    This news mega, and Hexbear writ large, is such a great resource for understanding what’s going on in the world. Proof that the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism really is the most powerful lens for understanding the reality around us.

    I sat down and ate breakfast for a long time at a hotel over the weekend. The breakfast room had Fox News blaring the whole time. Obviously you’re getting a heavy reactionary slant on things with them. But beyond that, it’s just the quality of information was so low, it was actively harmful to watch. You’d better informed not watching anything and absorbing information about the world around you from the ether. Saw some MSNBC last month and it’s not much better. Not so much inventing reality from whole cloth like Fox News, but still leaving out plenty of critical information, without which you still really can’t understand the world around you.

    It’s never been more clear to me how deeply propagandized mainstream news is. It’s not even always a conscious act (though it definitely is a lot of the time), just your normal base/superstructure stuff.

    And this news mega, this site, and Marxism broadly is such an oasis. Helps you not only stay properly informed, but keeps your sanity as well.

  • In case you missed it Zelenskyy pushes allies for direct involvement in Ukraine’s war with Russia.

    Some rather legitimately impossible demands from Zelenskyy in there:

    “Russians are using 300 planes on the territory of Ukraine. We [Ukraine] need at least 120-130 planes to resist in the sky,” Zelenskyy said, again calling on Western allies to supply with additional air defence systems. Ukraine is waiting for the delivery of US-designed F-16 fighter jets.

    He just asked for 130 fighter jets from NATO? What the actual hell! Ukraine only had 170 jets in 2014 before the war started. Does any NATO country except for the USA even have that many spare jets? Zelenskyy is asking for an entirely new air force to fight Russia, direct from NATO. He really sees NATO as Amazon Prime for arms shipments or something.

    He [Zelenskyy] said if countries could not supply the planes straight away, they could still fly them from neighbouring NATO states and shoot down Russian missiles.

    Ukraine was also negotiating with international partners to use their weapons to strike Russian military hardware at the border and further inside Russian territory, Zelenskyy said.

    “So far, there is nothing positive,” he said.

    Did he just ask for European airforces to directly participate in the war? Is he out of his mind?! Of course NATO said you you clueless fool!

  • China re-establishes direct flights with Cuba to strengthen relationship with the Caribbean

    Cuba bets on Chinese tourism to help improve economic situation amid embargo

  • China's new drills are extensive.

    I still don't think an invasion will come to pass but they're definitely ready to do one at this point.

  • In adventurism news, the shooter of Fico's testimony leaked and y'all probably won't hear about it in western media (as i predicted) as it turns out he indeed did it because Fico was anti-Ukraine (amongst others).

  • Any liberal who still defends Israel at this point is completely irredeemable, and should forever be treated as the fascists that they truly are. They deserve no mercy in a post-revolution world.

  • @AryJeay reports:

    Al-Qassam launched about 10-12 long-range rockets, from Rafah, travelling 100-110km to hit Tel Aviv, after a hiatus of 4 months. The Iron dome failed to intercept the rockets, more than 8 direct impacts were made, causing material damage and the ignition of fire.

    2 settlers were also injured.

  • holy fuck is it exhausting to talk to redditbrained liberals IRL

    I made the mistake to actually engage in a discussion about politics, and all the greatest hits came out -- and the worst, most frustating thing about this that I was treated like the weirdo, and I didn't even get into the "more controversial" topics

    You think socialism is good? How do you explain Pol Pot then?!

    They were literally propped up by the USA/CIA it's not even controversial at this point. [then they looked at me like I said grey aliens killed Princess Diana]

    Well Israel's reaction is understandable, Khamas murdered and raped civilians you see

    ... Israel killed literally 100x as many civilians

    If you are a moral person, you must condemn Putin's invasion of a sovereign country

    Well, USA also invaded sovereign countries, and almost nobody gave a shit

    That was a long time ago

    The US war criminals are literally golfing as we speak

    But Ukraine did nothing they were just minding their own business

    wellll, except UKR did shell civilians in Donbass

    Have you been brainwashed by Ruzzian propaganda?

    Putin wants to bring back the Sovyet Yunyon, and the whole point of the USSR was Russian world domination

    What? THe USSR wasn't even a Russian ethnostate? what the fuck are you talking about?

    Where did the so called revolution start? St Petersburg! Where is St Petersburg? Russia! It was a Russian plot for world domination

    I guess you also think that the Holodomor was good

    ... Not even Western liberal historians (with a few neocon exceptions) believe that there was a genocide there

    So you DENY the HOLODOMOR??!?!

    As I said, not even Western liberal historians (with a few neocon exceptions) believe that there was a genocide there, unlike what Churchill did to starve Bangladesh, that is actually well documented

    Well we also condemn THAT

    Yet you curiously never bring it up, but if someone mentions anything remotely Russian you start harping about the "Holodomor", and "Soviet-Russian imperialism"....

    So you actually DENY the Holodomor? Like people would just LIE?! And the GULAGS were good?!?!

    You see the GULAG was not a unique phenomenon, at the same time Africa was full of concentration camps run by the Fr*nch and the Bri'ish

    But they did NOT put THEIR OWN people in camps! Putting your own people in camps is the WORST

    I give up, I'm afraid it's a terminal case of brainworms

  • This is old news and not of great importance but it's a silly little story about the uselessness of liberal western progressivism that I don't think has been posted here before:

    On May 8th the chairperson of the Copenhagen Pride organisation resigned to appease angry corporate sponsors who were cutting funding for the parade.

    What angered companies like Google and Mærsk so much was a statement put out back in February by the pride organisation in which they declared that the organisation "stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people" and stated that the organisation would "voice concern over business activities in 'Israel' and the occupied Palestinian territories" to their partners.

    Sponsors and the liberal establishment were deeply offended by the statement that they saw as a demand for them to take a stand against the genocide. The pride organisation demonstrated a complete lack of backbone as soon as the sponsors they depend on fire funding started leaving and put our a new statement apologising for "poor communication" and promised that they were "not asking any questions or making any demands" to their partners regarding 'Israel' and Palestine.

    Eventually the chairperson decided to resign as a way of appeasing sponsors.

    Received mainstream wisdom as communicated through the mainstream media quickly settled on siding with the sponsors. Everybody seems to agree that it was foolish of the organisation to say "please don't be an accessory to genocide" to their corporate sponsors, "experts" in the media are talking about how the pride organisation needs to fire their top leadership and grovel at the feet of corporate sponsors and everybody who have opinions for a living are talking about how you shouldn't connect LGBT rights to "a complex conflict in the middle East".

  • TLDR of Simplicius's article yesterday:

    • Ukraine is, all of a sudden, finding significant success in hitting Russian air defence with ATACMS for some reason. Generally, how it's gone is that Russia shoots most of them down, but one or two missiles in the salvo gets through and wipes out the S-400/300 anyway. The good news is that the Russian doomers now have something to complain about again; it was deeply harmful of Russia to deprive Rybar's habitat of bad news as it's a critical part of their diets. It won't really change the course of the war necessarily, but...
    • Ukraine is also taking shots at Russian early warning nuclear ICBM sites, which is, to say the least, concerning. There's been some news about Russia doing tactical nuke exercises, but Simplicius points out that in this kind of war where vehicles and troops are generally fairly distributed and not in massive parking lots all concentrated together, a tactical nuke wouldn't achieve much that a bunch of conventional explosives couldn't, outside of cities at least. And we both doubt that Russia is close to nuking Ukrainian cities. But there's an implicit threat there nonetheless, which NATO may listen to, or may not.
    • Putin's been talking recently about how Zelensky is now an illegitimate ruler given the lack of elections in Ukraine, which is interesting when combined with the information that Yanukovich was recently spotted landing in Belarus. To be fair, there are alternative explanations (many high-up figures were brought there and perhaps Yanukovich was just asked to tag along due to the whole "brotherly nations" thing) but even so.
    • There have been rumors/claims recently in the media that Putin wants to freeze the conflict along the current front lines and sue for peace; this has been denied by Peskov.
    • There's been a fair amount of activity in rooting out corruption in the Russian army. As I understand it, none of it is incredibly major - some bribes here, a little unauthorized action there, and some punishments for underperforming commanders. But it is still a lot, all at once.
    • As always, rumors of new fronts opening up. Obviously with the whole thing in Kharkov now, I find it much harder to ignore these rumors, but an invasion from Belarus still seems a little unlikely.
    • Speaking of Kharkov, the Russians are now issuing Russian license plates for the region and some officials are beginning to talk about letting Kharkov decide its future and all that jazz. Significant to be sure, but it doesn't herald any imminent attempt to seize all of Kharkov IMO, especially with Putin saying that they wouldn't try to capture it for the forseeable future and the fact that there's like a single Russian division there also indicates that the intent wasn't immediate, massive territorial expansion like with the beginning of the war. Ukraine is stripping men from both Donbass and also Kherson to face Russia up there. It looks like the Kherson front has been basically terminated, with whatever tiny gains Ukraine scraped together being abandoned and the water levels raised via upstream Ukrainian dams to prevent Russia from trying anything clever.
    • Generally the tempo of escalation and mutual threats between Russia and NATO continue, but this has been a theme for literal years now (I remember at least one Putin speech in like summer 2022 warning NATO), so, unlike the new front rumors, I mostly ignore these as just saber-rattling and behind-the-scenes activity that's being aired for effect until I'm given a big reason to believe them.

    It's worth noting with the ATACMS thing that some of the big pro-Russian people on Twitter are stating that Ukrainian usage of ATACMS is through the roof and they've already fired an appreciable fraction of all the ATACMS ever produced (and, in typical American fashion, they make very few per year), and that Russian losses aren't so bad comparatively (I mean, they aren't, if I understand the number of destroyed systems versus the number the Russians have ever made/can make per year - which I may not understand as I'm not a military guy). Others can work out if this is accurate reporting or cope, just saying what I've saw. But Simplicius did sound fairly concerned about it in the article. Not very concerned, but fairly concerned.

  • The news coming out of Rafah is horrific. I've deliberately avoided looking at the images, but I can't stop crying.

    I'm not a third worldist, but even with the widespread protests in the west, how can this kind of injustice be resolved without something at least a little like a JDPON?

  • I don’t know what the right word is. My first thought was to call it “gaslighting” but I don’t think this is the right word here. Maybe there’s a better non-English word.

    What I’m referring to is the fact that no one on planet Earth believes Israel isn’t intentionally murdering civilians by the thousands. There is no explanation for not letting food and water in if not for reasons of collective punishment. Like, I’ve even tried to come up with a BS line I would take if I was Israel, and I can’t think of one. To my knowledge Israel hasn’t even really addressed not letting food and water in, they just simply do it.

    We all know what Israel is doing. But the imperialists and Zionists simply trot out lines about “Israel isn’t targeting civilians” and “Hamas is the enemy, not the Palestinian people”. No one believes it but we are sort of “expected” to believe it. What would you actually call this?

  • The White House has said it is looking into the incident wherein Israeli authorities seized equipment from The Associated Press, and called the incident “concerning”.

    White House or Elon Musk?

  • Praying for an end to settlement and anti-semitism. The world will never be free of that prejudice until Israel ceases to exist and colonize in its name.

    “Not only do we live in fear of displacement at the hands of a colonialism that professes itself as Jewish, not only are our people bombarded by an army that marches under what it claims is the Jewish flag, and not only do Israeli politicians over enunciate the Jewishness of their operations, we are told to disregard the Star of David soaring on their flag—the Star of David they carve into our skin.”

    -Mohammed El-Kurd

    https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/jewish-settlers-stole-my-house-its-not-my-fault-theyre-jewish/

  • China seems to be escalating it's Taiwan policy Essentially, if you're chill we're chill, but if you keep escalating we'll keep escalating "until reunification."

    A few years ago, I would've called anyone suggesting a hot war over Taiwan to be insane. These days... it still seems pretty crazy, but it'll depend on how much Taiwan lets America run their politics. Surely they don't want to be the next Ukraine?

  • Whether or not anything comes from the International Criminal Court or International Court of Justice remains to be seen, but what has been done with these institutions is destigmatize the act of leveling criticism against the state of Israel, criticizing Israeli society; Israel's rampage being livestreamed and frequently archived has permanently tarnished its reputation within the West. The act of enabling genocide has denigrated the legitimacy of the US and its allies.

    The state of Israel has severely diminished its credibility as self-appointed papacy of the Jewish faith and aegis of the Jewish people.

    What this horror has proved is how direct action by activists impacts policy decisions in the private sector and challenges the state for good or ill to take action. Repression and capitulation by state and capital - and not through electoral politics - sheds light to myth that elections and electioneering - abdication of power through delegation - is a farce; this exposition radicalizes the young and heritors of society.

    Though I can't cite when or where Ilan Pappe said this, but he noted that Israel is approaching or in the next stage of BDS. Divestment.

    What I think all of this would amount to is further castration of liberalism's capacity to manage social and class antagonisms; the state will lean into further escalation of force with greater frequency.

    Our democracy, already an extant rotating dictatorship, will punish dissidents across the mainstream with closing parity as it has with internally colonized and preexisting second-class citizens.

  • The Zionist entity resorting to Unit 731 shit:
    https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1794314820717629633
    https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/israel-torture-chambers-message-directed-us-palestinians

    There they lie day after day, night after night, in a state of utter sensory deprivation, with nothing to distract from their wounds and pain. In the midst of this, Israeli medical interns can use their exposed, vulnerable flesh as a canvas for experimentation.

    According to one whistleblower, the detention centre has quickly gained a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”.

    There, they are allowed to use Palestinians as little more than lab rats and encouraged to carry out medical procedures they are not qualified to perform.

    A whistleblower told CNN: “I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise.”

    Such procedures were frequently done without anaesthesia. Unlike doctors in Gaza, Israeli doctors have ready access to painkillers. It is a choice not to use them.

1321 comments