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.
Today, we are not interested in supporting Hamas or Islamic Jihad because they are Islamic movements, nor are we standing in defense of the Popular and Democratic Fronts because they represent the Palestinian left. What concerns us about these factions and movements is that they are national liberation movements, growing in the eyes of the people, and their presence increases with the increase of their military activities, their military strength, their social political influence, the clarity of their political vision, the strength and solidity of their discourse, and their firmness in confronting the enemy.
It is also no longer acceptable for factions to go to Beijing or other foreign capitals and issue a statement that mimics the two-state solution and the like. It is time to tell the Chinese and others that Palestine is no less important to Palestinians and the Arab people than Taiwan is to China, and that the enmity between Palestinians and the Zionists is no different in its magnitude from the enmity that existed between the Chinese and the Japanese during the Japanese occupation of China. The Zionist massacres in Gaza are no different in their brutality from the Japanese massacres in the Chinese city of Nanjing. And the experiments conducted by the Japanese Unit 731 on Chinese civilians are no different in their brutality from the practices of the Zionist entity against Palestinians.
China’s position today towards the Palestinians’ struggle should be no less solid and supportive than China’s position with the Vietnamese. The hundreds of thousands of Arab martyrs from Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and others rose for the Arabism of Palestine and its liberation, and they did not sacrifice themselves for the two-state solution or for any other deformed agreement.
Without a doubt, the political position of the Palestinian resistance negotiators has reached unprecedented levels of strength, firmness, and commitment to core principles. This approach has earned widespread popular support. The reason for this is not, as some claim, that Gaza has nothing left to lose. Rather, it stems from the resistance’s battlefield prowess and the hard-learned lessons from a century of struggle and the failures of negotiated surrender. They have seen through every deception and ploy of the enemy. The resistance and its leaders have proven their dedication by sacrificing their families, homes, and lives for the cause.
The Palestinian resistance is an integral part of a large camp extending from Lebanon to Iraq to Syria to Yemen and Iran, to the Arab people in their various countries and places of existence, and free peoples in friendly countries in South Africa, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, and others, reaching to universities and streets of the US and Europe and elsewhere, forming in their entirety a great rising resistance camp in the face of imperialism, Zionism, and colonialism.
These days mark the anniversary of the first Zionist conference in Basel, Switzerland (August 29, 1897), where the Zionist movement began preparing and mobilizing to build its entity in Palestine. Today, after all these years of conspiracy and killing, in the battle of Al-Aqsa Flood the Palestinian resistance carried out an operation breaching one of the world’s most fortified lines, and the Lebanese resistance was able to strike the enemy’s most important military bases and remove the threat of a hundred thousand Zionists from the northern settlements. The Yemeni armed forces closed one of the most important waterways in the world, neutralizing the two most powerful naval forces in modern times.
The great victory that began on October 7, 2023, returned Palestine to its Arab, Islamic, and international roots, and shook the pillars of the Zionist project. This victory must be completed by defeating the occupation and foiling its plans. This requires us to act as victors. It is our right and duty to act as victors.
I feel like the article is calling out the factions for wasting time in Beijing:
Considering all this, we must analyze the nature of the required political discourse. Positions that were acceptable for Palestinians and resistance factions before October 7 are no longer valid after all this destruction, after the changes occurring in the balance of power, and after the legendary steadfastness of the Palestinian people and all their sacrifices.
It is also no longer acceptable for [resistance] factions to go to Beijing or other foreign capitals and issue a statement that mimics the two-state solution and the like. It is time [for the resistance factions] to tell the Chinese and others that Palestine is no less important to Palestinians and the Arab people than Taiwan is to China, and that the enmity between Palestinians and the Zionists is no different in its magnitude from the enmity that existed between the Chinese and the Japanese during the Japanese occupation of China.
The article has a point. If you send delegations to China, you can't then turn around and say that China isn't doing enough.