Image is of the Cuban flag and the Pride flag on the Havana Health Ministry building.

Inspired by a highly upvoted recommendation by @[email protected]:

We need to kill the Mega Posting Wars meme. It wasn’t very funny to start with and now I get the feeling some people are taking it way too seriously. Clogging up the news thread with bullshit just to try to out post the trans mega is just dumb and annoying.

The News Megathread is now under trans martial law:

  1. Loving trans people on this site and elsewhere is strictly mandatory.

  2. Posting about the “comment wars” between the trans and news megathreads is now strongly discouraged inside the news megathread. No shame in it - I also recently made jokes about it - but though they were almost always just jokes, it was unrelated to current events and was beginning to feel more like padding the comment count instead of trying to improve the quality of the thread. If you want to boost comments and engagement here, then post articles and analysis!

The COTW (Chemical of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific chemical every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied chemicals. If you’ve wanted to talk about the chemical 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 Chemicals of the Week are Estrogen and Testosterone! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

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

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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.

Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.

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.
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.

    • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      27·
      2 months ago

      A lot of this, especially about BRICS not being willing to commit to de-dollarisation during the window of opportunity for it, was pointed out by Patrick Bond last year in his piece titled Samir Amin’s diagnosis of worst-case racial capitalism, centred on South Africa and BRICS. It is well worth reading. I’ll provide some excerpts.

      In a 2015 Monthly Review essay, Amin (2015) confirmed his negative impression:

      “The ongoing offensive of United States-Europe-Japan collective imperialism against all the peoples of the South walks on two legs: the economic leg – globalised neoliberalism forced as the exclusive possible economic policy; and the political leg — continuous interventions including pre-emptive wars against those who reject imperialist interventions. In response, some countries of the South, such as the BRICS, at best walk on only one leg: they reject the geopolitics of imperialism but accept economic neoliberalism.”

      In a follow-up, he critiqued the BRICS because economically, “success is primarily defined in terms of the neoliberal ideology, as an example of the success of ‘happy globalisation’” (Amin 2016c, 138).

      As we can see, this is very much the case, countries of the global south reject try to the geopolitical interventions of imperialism, such as opposing the Israeli genocide of Gaza, and opposing NATO in the Russia - Ukraine war, yet they accept neoliberal economics, globalisation and dollarisation. Thus, they cannot truely reject the former.

      The overarching concern of Washington has been the potential for a major geopolitical bloc to emerge around Xi and especially Vladimir Putin, including BRICS allies South Africa and Brazil, yet the Johannesburg summit did not push that agenda in any obvious way, and Putin was compelled to stay in Moscow because of the International Criminal Court warrant. The BRICS (2023) Johannesburg Declaration did indeed confirm the location of BRICS squarely within imperialism’s multilateral institutions, with explicitly-stated support for the:

      “rules-based multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) at its core… a market-oriented agricultural trading system… a robust Global Financial Safety Net with a quota-based and adequately resourced IMF at its center… [with] increases in the quota shares of emerging markets and developing economies (EMDCs)… including in leadership positions in the Bretton Woods institutions… global consensus on economic policies… the importance of the G20 to continue playing the role of the premier multilateral forum in the field of international economic and financial cooperation… We note the opportunities to build sustained momentum for change by India, Brazil and South Africa presiding over the G20 from 2023 to 2025.”

      The simple message here, is that instead of overturning the high table of Western economic power, the bloc is intent on stabilizing and relegitimizing that ‘rules-based order’ – in spite of a glaring contradiction, namely that its underlying ideology, the Washington Consensus, has caused so much suffering in so many low-income BRICS communities.

      … As for the BRICS Bank, the main 2023 controversy surrounded the need to increase local-currency lending – because its President Dilma Rousseff confirmed a rise from 22 to 30 percent of its asset base in non-dollar or euro currencies by 2030, a revealingly unambitious objective. The BRICS Bank agreed to Western financial sanctions against Russia (a 19 percent owner) in 2022 due to its fear of the New York credit ratings agencies’ downgrade, bragging that Moscow loans represented less than 7 percent of the bank’s assets.

      • meth_dragon [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        2 months ago

        though geopolitically it feels like we’re more situated in a united provinces -> gb process i think economically it’s more useful to consider the gbp -> usd transition:

        Through its support for the international gold standard, the New York financial community thus encouraged and sustained London’s ultimately futile attempts to remain at the center of world finance… most Western governments shared the conviction that only the re-establishment of the pre-1914 world monetary system, “this time on solid foundations,” could restore peace and prosperity.

        Ironically, however, this concerted effort, instead of reviving the pre-1914 world monetary system, precipitated its terminal crisis… The pursuit of stable currencies under the pressure of “capital flight” eventually turned the stagnation of world trade and production of the 1920s into the slump of the early 1930s.

        seems like we are hereabouts

        … as the dependence of the world’s payment system on the US dollar increased, the United States acquired foreign assets… on private account to over $8 billion. Ultimately, however, the growing structural imbalances of world payments were bound to impair the continuation of the process… The halt in US foreign lending and investment was made permanent by the collapse of the Wall Street boom and the ensuing slump in the US economy. Faced with sudden recalls or flights of short term funds, one country after another was forced to protect its currency, either by depreciation or exchange control. The suspension of the gold convertibility of the British pound in September 1931 led to the final destruction of the single web of world commercial and financial transactions on which the fortunes of the City of London were based. Protectionism became rampant, the pursuit of stable currencies was abandoned, and “world capitalism retreated into the igloos of its nation-state economies and their associated empires.”

    • Hexboare [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      23·
      2 months ago

      Russia literally had to suspend trade with India after selling a huge amount of cheap oil to India because they have accumulated record amount of Indian rupees with no ways of spending them. Everyone is just starting to realize how powerful the US dollar is, and how much more inconvenient it can be when you refuse to use them.

      I don’t think they suspended trade? Discussions on a rupee rouble mechanism were reported to have broken down (reported in the western media) but bilateral trade has actually grown.

      It’s also difficult for Russians to spend rupees because they are only partially convertible and indian firms might be hit with US sanctions for some exports.

      how much more inconvenient it can be when you refuse to use them

      I don’t think Russia has much choice in the matter?