August 1st's update is here! TLDR? Here's the summary.
Go here for live updates on the Taiwan situation.
August 3rd's update is here! TLDR? Here's the summary.
No updates on Thursdays.
August 5th's update is here! TLDR? Here's the summary.
August 6th's update is here! 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.
For days most people were like "there is 0% percent chance China shoots her plane down or pulls some Top Gun shit to scare her" but then just three measly hours after she lands, mofos like "why thy dOn't shOot her dOwn, wOw chIna rEal paper tiger enErgy"
Bunch of impatient hedgehogs here, dam let the Chinese take off their jacket first lol
I've been having to deal with these kinds of people every week for the last five months. Their brains have been fried by constant internet usage and their attention spans are null. Seriously, I'm begging you, if you're like "dang, Russia hasn't taken Ukraine yet, they're going too slowly" or "dang, China hasn't invaded Taiwan yet, they're going too slowly", please, genuinely, log off for at least a little bit. They look at the chessboard and if a move isn't a checkmate, it's a boring snoozefest and America is still winning, even if that move was critical for positioning against America in the near-to-mid future.
It's difficult to describe how badly America has just fucked up. Yes, sure, criticize China for not sticking true to their threats (it hasn't even been close to 24 hours yet) or whatever you want to do, but this has guaranteed that China will never go along with American plans again. If there was even the slightest hope that America could pry Russia and China apart, that hope has now been shot in the back of the head with a boltgun. And Taiwan gained what, exactly? A piece of paper and a speech from one of the oldest and most addled politicians in America's history?
China is not Russia. Russia could survive being cut off from the global market. Absolutely not thrive, the money line would go way down, and it would suck for most Russians probably, but they have the natural resources and food they need to continue functioning almost indefinitely if a giant glass dome was dropped over them. China cannot do that. It does not have the farmland for food to feed all its people, and it does not have a large enough domestic energy industry yet. A proxy war with the West via Taiwan, with the full sanctions regime, would cause the West to go into instant and long-lasting economic recession, but it would also starve and kill a lot of Chinese people. It's not a course you embark on lightly.
An it's honestly kinda disappointing that there are people here and across the left - I'm not making any claims about how widespread it is - so desperately want what is basically nuclear armageddon. To a certain extent I understand the desire to just burn it all down permanently - it is quite revolutionary in a way - but I think it's much more harmful of an impulse than they realize, and I think it's only really a result of being on the internet too long, because if you stated a desire like "Yeah, Xi should just nuke us all!" even jokingly, then you'd get a lot of strange looks from regular non-brainpoisoned people.
The collapse of America will not be measured in weeks, or months, or even years, it will be decades of a mixture of slow decline and sudden fractures (e.g. Ukraine, Taiwan). Patience is required. We all know the spiel: do what you are able to do when you are able to do it, and in real life if you possibly can. Events are accelerating, and there are weeks where decades happen, but the left - not twitter leftists dunking on 4chan dorks with anime avatars, not reddit leftists making snarky replies to r/politics posts about how awesome epic chungus Zelenskiyiyy's army is, but the actual working class organizations that form an alternative and resistance to the current domestic and global hegemony - needs to be built first.
With regards to resources, but primarily food I also think climate change is a time bomb and if this is their excuse for not going to war then China may as well never go to war ever again because food production is only going to get worse as we have more climate disasters. In any case it may take years if not decades for the third world exporters to recover from this economic crisis.
Very much like the Russian issue with NATO expansion, the US took concrete and decisive steps while ignoring Putin's warnings and red lines.
The same is happening now so the issue may not be avoiding the war, but rather picking the appropriate timing like Putin. Maybe this isn't best time for China to start a war, but I also doubt the circumstances are doing to be better in the future.
The fall of the US and EU is going to be a long process and it seems they'll become more and more deranged. If China takes the conservative approach and backs down now we will be having this same discussion 5 or 10 years from now and the only difference is the world economy is even worse than before.
I think there are ways for China for solve both their food and energy problems - the first requires widespread organic farming methods and inevitably aid from Russia (which is in progress), and the latter requires them to shrink their usage of fossil fuels to at least the level that Russia and Iran can supply all their needs while the rest is supplied by nuclear and renewable energy (which they also appear to be doing).
As you say, I don't think it's impossible for China to go to war right this minute, but it would be very risky compared to if they put all their focus into decoupling themselves as much as possible from western products and, say, five years down the line, they might be able to survive the sanctions much better than today. Perhaps the US is at some level aware of the fact that China will only become more powerful if left to develop without having some of their resources drawn into a war and so is goading them via Taiwan provocations before it's too late to stop them. On the other hand, in those five years, the US can develop decent hypersonic missiles and Taiwan can further increase their defences, and climate change will affect China's ability to respond effectively, and so on.
There are risks in either approach. I will wait patiently to see what China's response will be in the coming days, weeks, and months.
Imagine if this thread existed when the riots in Hong Kong were popping off. Half the people here would want Xi to just send the tanks to kill them all, unironically demanding a Tiananmen Square massacre as dreamed up by liberals. Instead, the PRC handled the riots perfectly. The rioters were obviously groomed by their Western handlers to bait the HK police into being violent towards them, so what the HK police did was simple: they simply didn't take the bait. By not taking the bait, the rioters were forced to be more extreme, which alienated less radical supports as well as solidified the rest of China against the rioters. Far from destabilizing China, the riots in the end led to average citizens rallying behind the PRC. Once they resorted to waving American flags while wearing MAGA hats, the jig was up and the rioters were revealed as the color revolution clowns they were.
Russia's not even being cut off. That's half the joke on this. They're economy is going up! thanks to the US accidentally doing an OPEC.
They were integrated into the global economy over a decade ago and contributed for well below the market rate. Now they're sitting on the proverbial gold mine.
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
:parenti::parenti: :parenti::parenti::parenti: