Very slight change of plans: I'll begin the updates next Monday instead of this Friday. So this week will have no updates. Dang. So y'all better post hard enough to make up for it. But not so hard that we get past 1000 comments by the end of the week.
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists, for the “buh Zeleski is a jew?!?!” people.
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.
These fuckers allowed intellectual property to become so egregious that a tombstone can keep collecting royalties on a song for 50 years, that life saving medicines can be monopolized for decades, that oil companies can sit on critical patents for clean energy and do nothing with them as the world burns, and that multinational corporations can patent just about any industrial process which has existed for over a century as long as they stick a computer in it somewhere, and they want us to cry about their shit getting ripped off. Motherfucker, I'm with China. I'll steal whatever I can get my hands on. We should start something like scihub but for blueprints and schematics.
The only form of intellectual property you can make a case for keeping is trademark. I want to know where the product was made. It can be a complete fucking rip-off of someone else's design, I don't care. Patent, copyright and trade secret are abolished. Have every factory manufacturing the best designs, not the shit we have now where they all try to circumvent each-other's patents by intentionally developing sub-optimal and incompatible mechanisms as a workaround. I just want to know where to take it if it has a defect. Even still, trademark as it presently exists is absurd. You have companies like Apple getting trademarks on rounded rectangles, companies like Fluke getting trademarks on the color yellow. That shit needs to get shut the fuck down. Also all the designer fashion shit like Tiffany or Gucci. If the trademark is in anyway a bourgeois class signifier, it's protections are gone. Bubba down at the local auto garage is free to slap Rolls Royce and Bently emblems (preferably both) on the shitty Dodge Neon he's trying to sell.
If I remember the IP law class I took years back right, some golf gear brand owns a European trademark for using the smell of freshly cut grass to sell sporting equipment. Absolute madness.
I can see a limited case for trademarks in telling consumers who made the product and who's responsible for fixing it if it breaks but current rules are completely bizarre.
100%. I think of it like pears of jeans. You have all these companies making jeans. They are all the same product more or less. Canvas pants with a fly, button, pockets, and belt loops. You slap your name on them so people know which factory they came from. The abundant ones build a reputation, the resilient ones build a reputation, the ones sustained by sweatshop child labor build a (radioactive) reputation.
I just thought of this, but as a part of my trademark reforms, I would introduce two changes. 1: You cannot license a trademark. If somebody else is making the thing, you are not making the thing. There are no profits from branding. Only from production. 2: If you claim a trademark, you must use it. You can't do this shit where you use hundreds of trademarks to obscure industrial ownership structures from the public.
Trademark becomes literally "we made this." Not a branding tool to wield hype and public perception to rip people off. Ideally, trademark dissolves into nothing else aside from the union bug.
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You could literally just replace the current IP framework with a sliding scale of royalties.
In terms of trademarks, I wonder if what you're getting is really about better supply chain information - a good factory in China with a high level of QA is a good factory regardless of who is having their goods produced there.
:yes-chad:
Trademark, but only for union bugs. Anybody can make Gucci bags, but I want to know that my AFSCME Gucci bag is authentic.