Bulletins and News Discussion from March 4th to March 10th, 2024 - The Coalition of Losers - COTW: Pakistan
Bulletins and News Discussion from March 4th to March 10th, 2024 - The Coalition of Losers - COTW: Pakistan
Image is of a protest in Pakistan after the attempted assassination of Imran Khan in November 2022.
What a clusterfuck of an election.
Imran Khan, the previous official Prime Minister of Pakistan, was removed by the command of the United States in April 2022 in a no confidence motion. This made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Imran Khan and his supporters have protested since then against the Pakistani state, which is more-or-less governed by the military despite the furnishings of civilian rule. This has ranged from largely peaceful protests to trying to burn down and occupy houses and headquarters.
It was assumed by the Pakistani elite that they could make the problem go away by arresting Imran Khan and effectively forcing many PTI candidates to run as independents while hounding them with police raids and stopping them from campaigning - and adding salt on the wound by disabling social media access and mobile services on the day of the election to make it more difficult to co-ordinate. Fortunately, these people don't seem to quite understand how the internet works in the current day, and so Khan's supporters started up WhatsApp groups and improvised websites and apps to spread the word about which candidates to vote for, leading to Khan's party getting the plurality, though not the majority, of votes in the election.
This has created a rather depressed mood in the Pakistani elite. A coalition of eight parties joined together, obviously excluding the PTI, but this coalition is shaky and lacks much legitimacy, with two major parties inside it, the PML-N and PPP, being ideologically opposed on several issues. It has been regarded as "the coalition of losers" by Khan's supporters. The new Prime Minister is Shehbaz Sharif, who also ruled from April 2022 until August 2023 and is the younger brother of Nawaz Sharif, who served as Prime Minister three times before in the last few decades. With inflation at 30% and the economy greatly struggling, there are fears that things may only stay together for months, not years, before the coalition fragments and something else has to be done.
Your Monday briefing is here in the comments and here on the website. Your Thursday briefing is here in the comments and here on the website. Your Sundary briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country 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 Country of the Week is Pakistan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
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.
You're viewing a single thread.
Is there any basis behind the claim that Trump would be worse on Palestine than Biden, other than "Trump is evil, therefore, he will be worse than Biden on everything"?
Permanently Deleted
Yeah there's a billion cases where trump did something evil and biden just like, didn't reverse it. One notable example is that the embargoes against Cuba got much worse under trump, like, insanely bad; BUT biden hasn't reversed them at all.
If Trump were president all of the libs would call it a genocide, be in the streets with some half-informed signs, and there would be foreign policy incoherence fucking up "the plan" of politely dehumanizing and murdering the people of Gaza. The libs in the street would apply in other countries as well, you'd see more in the UK, more in France, even more in Germany while the political class struggled to triangulate between not associating with Trump but also wanting to support Israel no matter what they do. Trump would also telegraph genocidal intent even more and make the ICJ cases easier.
Overall the same machinery would all be at work under the hood but it would be easier for libs to recognize and point out. They'd be struggling with the fact they agree with Trump on something 100% and we could peel more of them off. There's also a much greater chance of fucking up the foreign policy approach.
There's also the fact that Biden has been a lifelong, absolutely zealous Zionist. To the extent he can personally make a difference (and still has the mental capacity to do so), you can be he's actively pushed the genocide along. Trump will personally be a Zionist, sure, but like a lot of other shit, his heart won't really be in it because it doesn't feed his narcissism very well. So I think you might see him initiate a lot of the same moves, but then lose interest and move on to the next thing. Damage along the way? Sure. But he just doesn't have the ideological fortitude, so to speak.
I think it's hilarious that the biggest thing liberals can point to to try to support that Trump would be worse on Israel is when he moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem...which was actually following Biden's plan to do so.
Oh no doubt that's a thread that ties all of it together. Biden has been an absolute ghoul for decades and knows how to throw competent people at the issues he cares about and that includes full support for the Zionist entity. His close advisors are also careerists that have honed their skills to launder these crimes as just good old progressive realist politics as usual. Biden is senile so that's a lot of what drives this. Trump has a grab-bag of suckups and careerists that got plopped in his lap that regularly rotate because he's a petty baby which is great for disrupting foreign policy plans that take years to develop. This is why the libs were 100% pro Deep State when Trump has the presidency: a good chunk of the careerist NatSec and intel folks that usually enjoy bipartisan support were occasionally frustrated by his arbitrariness and talked some shit and libs ate it up.
Usually, folks talk about how he is personally chummier with Netanyahu. There's also the chance that he could try to do dumb shit like invade Iran, Lebanon, or Yemen
But he's definitely not as ideologically committed as Genocide Joe is
He also decided not to kill people in iranwhen they downed drone, its some weird shit
Ha.. talking about proportionate..
he could try to do dumb shit like invade Iran
God I hope we get Millennium Challenged in that case.
The Houthis haven't had near the success sinking American ships that Ukraine has had sinking Russian ships.
Ukraine is the biggest army in Europe with access to a bunch of western weaponry + new domestic weapons made with the knowledge and resources from the Soviet era, while the Houthis are a rebel group using multiple decades old Iranian technology and limited domestic weapons development from that.
It could be escalation management by Ansra Allah. They don’t seem to be using swarm tactics, which are the pretty obvious option to take if you actually want to get through the active defense measures a US warship would have, so it is consistent with their tactics that they don’t want to actually sink a US warship since the current level of strategic escalation is significantly in their favor.
Or it could be that even Ukraine with western reconnaissance and intelligence and missiles that tens of millions of dollars have only managed to hit a handful of Russian ships. Maybe it’s actually pretty hard to sink a modern warship.
The only scenario I’ve heard of warships being easy to take out is when hypersonic missiles are considered.
To paraphrase Andrei Martyanov’s The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs, if we know the odds of one missile hitting a ship is something like 30% and that it would take 5 such missiles to sink it, there’s only a little bit of probability math to show that it would take 38 such missiles to have a better than 90% chance to sink the ship. I think the real missiles being used here are both more accurate and more potent than that hypothetical. Hypersonic missiles are uniquely threatening to US power (at least in theory, I don’t want to call anything until we see the first carrier reef) because it is a global hegemon that sees itself as rival to regional powers. The US is always the aggressor, and the defender can usually only project force outside their borders so far. The maximum range of your enemies’ anti-ship missiles is a no-go line for an intelligently run fleet, and hypersonic missiles can push that range out to a 1000 miles.
With trump you have to account for him changing policy over some real or perceived slight.
The fact that Trump sometimes is persuaded to change his mind is honestly a plus compared to Biden
Yeah and it doesn't even need to be Netanyahu who Trump gets mad at
He could just get pissed at Jared for eating the last english muffin or something
moved the embassy + made the US the only country that recognises Israel's claims over the Golan Heights are two things that come to mind.
Moving the embassy was Biden's plan. Trump was just following it.
really?
Straight from Congress' "mouth":
Go ahead and CTRL-F "Biden" on that page.
Jesus Christ lol Biden is a comically evil figure of American politics huh
seems to me Trump is less of a raging Zionist than Biden, even if he did move the embassy. I think to Trump that was an easy and mostly symbolic action whereas Biden's support runs deeper down to his bones
I think he would be just as bad if not worse based on the rhetoric that he says about killing everyone related to “terrorists”, that he moved the embassy, that he loves Bibi, and that his political party and its base is in favor of blowing up all Muslims.
Many of trumps actions as president set the stage for Palestinians and Iran to view any diplomacy as a farce.
I think Joe Biden is terrible, but I don’t think anyone should start having an opinion that Trump is in anyway better or neutral. More specifically, the bloodlust from the GOP as a whole is definitely something I am not excited for after he returns to office Jan 2025.
that he loves Bibi
Trump has shit talked Bibi more than any other US politician as far as I know. I'm pretty sure he stopped liking Bibi at all after he congratulated Biden, and Trump holds grudges.
Trump and Bibi were buddy buddy up until 2020 election defeat. The moment Trump wins Bibi will congratulate him and Trump will accept. Come on he acknowledged golan heights, moved the embassy, and most recently said Israel is doing right because they “have to finish the problem”
Believe whatever you want, the US policy will either remain the same or get worse.
Yeah, I'm not suggesting Trump would necessarily be better. All I'm saying is he doesn't actually give a shit about Bibi or Israel, he's a narcissist. He might flip on Bibi again if Bibi congratulates him, but he also doesn't like losers and Bibi is on his way to being a loser politically and is currently a loser militarily. Biden is a committed Zionist, full stop, there's no way to sway him at all.
I think Joe Biden is terrible, but I don’t think anyone should start having an opinion that Trump is in anyway better or neutral.
Biden is a complete true believer. He's just a unhinged Zionist to the point where even the Israeli PM Begin had to rebuff him when Biden said he didn't give a fuck if women and children had to die for Israel to survive. Begin, the former head of Irgun and the founder of Likud, thought Biden went too far. This is how much of an unrepentant Zionist Biden is.
We all know the monologue Biden gave where he said that if Israel didn't exist, the US would have to invent Israel. My interpretation is different from most people. His villain monologue where he gives his rationale in realpolitiks terms isn't his true belief but merely something he adopted for the sake of persuading people who aren't ideological Zionists. His true belief is not some realpolitiks rationale but ideological, and perhaps even religious, Zionism. This also means that the US will never let go of the Zionist entity until the Resistance is marching on the streets of Tel Aviv. There will be no ceasefire. The killing will not stop until the Zionist entity is forced out.
As for Trump, Trump doesn't believe in anything but himself. As much of a Zionist Trump is, he doesn't have the ideological force behind his Zionism that Biden has. At this point, the only people more of a Zionist than Biden are Kahanists.
Today Trump argued Biden was soft at that’s why Gaza revolted and that if he was President he “would finish the problem”
Believe whatever you want, the US president is not going to help Gaza in any way