Image is sourced from this Guardian article.
The Pope's fucking dead.
He gave JD Vance three chocolate easter eggs, exchanged pleasantries for 17 minutes, and then keeled over and died.
What a way to go.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
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 Telegram Channels:
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.
So Europe gives existing stocks of weapons to Ukraine, and buys new American weapons and restarts domestic defence industry to re-arm themselves? That's going to be an extremely tough sell to the western Europeans. The welfare state will be completely destroyed. American healthcare will be the best in the world by the time that plan is finished.
In Denmark the propaganda still works and the average people, as well as virtually everyone who has opinions for a living, is still in critically supporting the idea of mindless military escalation to defeat the Russian menace. Until now the regime has been able to fund the spending spree with the surplus generated by previously existing this public finances but the party is soon going to be over and the regime will have to find the funding somewhere.
A few years ago they abolished a public holiday to fund the military and even though people were even more Slava Ukraini back then it made the regime extremely unpopular and strained their traditional relations to the unions as well as to other right-wing parties. They have never recovered.
In a televised "debate" on how to defeat the Asiatic hordes, that took place shortly after Trump had his fallout with Zelensky, the regime tried to deflect on the question of funding, knowing very well that while the average westerner loves blood and steel they don't live paying for it. However the frivolous far-right "Liberal Alliance" party, the most popular party to the right of the regime and likely to gain significant power if the regime falls, were less mealy-mouthed, they wanted to reduce unemployment benefits from two to one years, with no reduction in unemployment fund membership fees for workers, in order to fund the military.
I reckon that we will see significant austerity to pay for militarism but I also don't think it will be a walk in the park for the ruling class to do. Propaganda can't make people forget about their material conditions forever.
The European establishment already has countless demonic articles lined up to try and manufacture consent about this sort of thing, although I'm not sure how effective they'll be - likely it'll be another contributing factor in right wing populist parties running on a vague anti war ticket winning in landslides in most European countries in the foreseeable future although how willing those parties will be to actually break with the US and NATO remains to be seen.
America already blew up nordstream 2 without any consequences, besides france, which is also struggling, no one in western europe will offer resistance.
Buying american to ship to ukraine via debt, on individual country level it won't fly (although germans and brits are particularly unhinged), but euro commission could swing like 50 billion a year, especially if the porky escapes into eurobonds. I know frenchies and geramns are constantly whining that they should buy european, but eh, countries make do.
That would still destroy the welfare state if done at the level required to keep Ukraine from collapsing, buying American weapons to hand to Ukraine.
And can those high tech American weapons even be used without American support? I guess the Europeans could try jerry rig them to function independently, in the same way they've helped Ukraine jerry rig their Soviet aircraft to launch European and American weapons. But that would not be optimal.
do you see germans, brits or french collapsing (by force) their government over this? they have like 2-3 years of unlimited power, toothless opposition (to this).
Frenchies literally ate increased retirement age to finance military, germans will go down even easier.
the biggest ticket items are like pac2 pac3 missiles for patriots, maybe bradleys, cause usa has fuckton of them, the rest is whatever, himars only i believe? they didn't ship jassm, and brits already do scalp rocket targeting.
the only big question is intelligence sharing in that configuration, otherwise seems completely workable.
There's also the 30 or so F-16AM fighter jets. And patriot is essential for high level air defence and anti ballistic missile defence at key locations. For this, Ukraine have patriot and the few S-300Vs and S-300Ps? We saw what happened to Sumy when Ukraine lost an S-300V battery, Russian Orion drones were able to go 10+km into Ukrainian airspace and Ukrainian positions in Kursk got bombed to bits. Does Europe have domestic ground based high level air defence systems? Ukraine got a total of one SAMP/T battery during the entire war. There's also APKWS with the VAMPIRE system which is important for taking out drones, the UK have offered their version of it to Ukraine, but it costs 10 times more per shot.