Bulletins and News Discussion from September 2nd to September 8th, 2024 - We Love Our Trans Comrades - Chemicals of the Week: Estrogen and Testosterone
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:
Loving trans people on this site and elsewhere is strictly mandatory.
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.
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.
Swedish Foreign Minster "suddenly and shockingly" resigned today according to Eurofreak and American media today. To the westoid reader, of course it's weird that the foreign minister of the newest NATO member suddenly resigns without any deeper context. But to us news enjoyers, it's very interesting that he resigns just one day after the deadly Poltava strike by the Russians, where Swedish personnel were hanging out according to reports and there was also a Facebook post by some Swedish ghoul that was mourning a dead friend in Ukraine. It wouldn't be the first time Swedes eat shit in Poltava, history is basically a circle. Media are talking about staff disagreements or whatever, but I'm noooooooticing something very fishy here. The true story about the scope of NATO's involvement in Ukraine will be fascinating when it slowly bubbles up in a few years after they throw the corpse of Ukraine to the wolves.
The Swedish connection is interesting because Ukraine has recently received some mini AWACS aircraft from Sweden, with the intention of bolstering the Ukrainian air force's capabilities along with the 80 planned F-16 fighter jets (only a handful have been delivered so far). The Swedish advisors were likely there at the Ukrainian Electronic Warfare school to instruct the Ukrainian military on how to operate these fancy "eyes in the sky". It's also interesting because Ukraine has tried to obtain Gripen fighter jets from Sweden in the past (a jet whose capabilities are much better suited towards fighting against Russia than the F-16) and got really close to a deal before it was called off.
No, no, NATO isn't at war with Russia. It's definitely not calling most of the shots while using Ukrainian boys as expendable cannon fodder to be slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands to achieve NATO's goal of opening up russia to western capitalists and stealing all of ukraine's farmland ahead of global food disruption caused by western carbon burning!
It is a plausible hypothesis. If the purge of the Swedish foreign minister is connected to the Poltava strike it could mean that:
They fucked up security and has been blamed for Russia finding out when and where to strike, and
You don't just purge a top minister without having a good reason. The strike could have hurt the Swedish state more than they're letting on. Either some really bad intelligence fuckup happened or the dead Swedes might have been hard to replace military specialists whose absence is significant for the Swedish military.