Here is July 11th's update! TLDR? Here's the summary.
Here is the update for July 12th and 13th! TLDR? Here's the summary.
News update for July 14th: I passed my exam! So I'm going out to celebrate today. Also, it looks like Japan is giving up on pretending it's a democracy, America is on its knees begging to invade Iran, and Moon of Alabama has an update on the current macro state of the war.
Here is the update for July 15th! TLDR? Here's the summary.
Here is the update for July 16th! TLDR? Here's the summary.
No updates on Sundays.
Links and Stuff
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
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 ~ Gleb Bazov, banned from Twitter, referenced pretty heavily in what remains of pro-Russian Twitter.
https://t.me/asbmil ~ ASB Military News, banned from Twitter.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster - crowd-funded U.S journalist, mostly pro-Russian, works on the ground near warzones to report news and talk to locals.
https://t.me/riafan_everywhere ~ Think it's a government news org or Federal News Agency? Russian language.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Front news coverage. Russian langauge.
https://t.me/rybar ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
With the entire western media sphere being overwhelming pro-Ukraine already, you shouldn't really need more, but:
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.
Russia may extend ‘gay propaganda’ ban to include adults
Russian lawmakers have proposed extending a ban on “gay propaganda”, broadening a law that human rights activists say has put LGBTQ people at risk and led to increased discrimination and violence.
The ban on the promotion of “non-traditional” sexual relationships to minors could be broadened to include adults, a senior legislator said.
Russia’s existing “gay propaganda” law, passed in 2013, has been used to stop gay pride marches and detain LGBTQ rights activists.
Under the proposed changes, any event or act regarded as an attempt to promote homosexuality could incur a fine, Reuters reported.
The head of the State Duma’s information committee, Alexander Khinshtein, said on Telegram:
The existing law envisages fines of up to 1m roubles (£13,400) or up to 15 days in jail for propagating “non-traditional sexual relations among minors”.
Source is Guardian
This is so fucked. I can't help wondering if the west, by using LGBT rights as an example of how much more civilised they were than the Asiatic hordes, has done the LGBT community of Russia and other independent countries a huge disservice. They have succeeded in making people think of LGBT rights a western thing, thereby putting LGBT people in the crosshairs of public opinion when justified anti-western sentiments grow. If you have a lot of old homophobia sloshing around in your cultural baggage and LGBT is something the event does, hating LGBT becomes really really easy.
I sincerely hope that Russia gets a homegrown LGBT liberation movement that is explicitly anti-western and anti-imperialist.
Meme of Eric Andre shooting a person symbolizing gays, and then in the next panel asking, why would the west do this?
It's nearly impossible to build a homegrown LGBT movement if the homegrown sentiments falsely equates it with the west. We have left adjacent politicians in hungary also saying that "maybe trans people shouldn't be driven into mass suicide" is useless western idpol and then pointing at fucking Latin America saying "see , there gay marriage wasn't the main priority, that's why they are successful" when it quite literally was for Lula for example.
The West does use LGBT NGOs to stir shit, that's a given but let's not act reacting to this with extreme homophobic oppression is the west's fault.
deleted by creator
Yeah i have the same experiences. The thing is, for example in hungary it's completely unnecessary, especially in the left, to go against LGBT issues or "useless idpol" as those who do, do, since while like from the outside it could seem that hungarian society has the same conservative brainworms but literally every poll that was made in the last decade (even by conservative pollsters) showed that most people support stuff like gay marriage or if not marriage, at least registered partnership. We even had a referendum about the same kind of "gay propaganda" law as in Russia that LGBT organisations, whether they got money from NED or not campaigned for invalid votes and won, the referendum ended up with more invalid votes than yes or no.
So for me it is even completely unreasonable especially for leftists to go against stuff like this, especially if there was an actual homegrown lgbt movement that could be used to consolidate power in the face of imperialism, just as it happened in Latin America.
I'm not well versed in Russian society but i highly doubt that Putin would be overthrown if he said "you know what, maybe gay people shouldn't be ostracized".
Nah, I don’t think so. It’s just appeal to social conservatism, I don’t think west had a lot to do with it. Russians are fairly unimpressed with public affection in general, so something like pride parade was doomed from the start. Before whole shitshow I think 50 percent of people were “let them do whatever they want without parades and adoption”. And adoption was manipulated by propaganda deliberately. Now conservatives are crawling from the rocks with good old “religion, government, people” shit though.
This is just demonstrably false, and you can see it in the rhetoric of Russian reactionaries as well as in the history of the US taking student movements that are hostile to the government and subverting them for the purpose of destabilization and full-on color revolution. That doesn't give Russia or those reactionaries an excuse, but there's a very clear association between gay rights movements and the west. Same thing happens in China, though China is thankfully not quite as reactionary about it.
It's why I don't care that Pride is banned or whatever in Russia.
"Oh no, there's nowhere for Western liberals to show up and talk about how shit a country they don't live in is. "
LGBT stuff will take a different form in Russia. It already has, and it will because it has to because of the western influence what we understand as "LGBT" is.
Transgender people are allowed to change their legal gender without requiring sex reassignment surgery in Russia, and being homosexuality isn't a criminal offense. They're a conservative country, but it's not the instant death sentence I see it portrayed as.
You see the LGBT flag as a symbol of acceptance, others will see it draped over the US embassy, a symbol created in a foreign country that destroyed their country for the crime of wanting to live better.
I cannot change the Russian culture,but we can change how we react to it.
:deeper-sadness:
Going to be interesting to watch how the USA spins this when the scotus undoes gay marriage
I think we already know, just more Russiagate bullshit where they blame a problem with :amerikkka: originating from americans on a foreign enemy
trump and the cia are controlled by china!