Bulletins and News Discussion from May 20th to May 26th, 2024 - Never Break TrueAnon's Rules For Life - COTW: Azerbaijan
Image is of Azerbaijan's President, Aliyev (left) and Armenia's President, Pashinyan (right) in a meeting a month or two after Azerbaijan took Nagorno-Karabakh.
Never go to a second location.
Always get the interior ministry post.
Never get in a helicopter or any small aircraft.
If someone with a gun enters your car, they’re gonna kill you.
If someone tells you they’re not going to kill you, they’re calming you down to kill you later.
Never give up your nukes.
Never release the opposition's political prisoners.
Never let the opposition delay elections.
If someone starts to get into German runes, drop them.
Never trust a South American with a German name.
Never move anywhere for a religion.
Never go into the sewers unless you’re a sewer guy.
If someone’s trying to get you to commit a crime, they're FBI (sometimes CIA or military intelligence).
Never become an FBI informant.
If you do become an FBI informant, record everything.
Never relinquish your arms.
Always get it in writing.
If you keep gambling, you’ll eventually win.
Never talk to cops without a lawyer.
Always pay your mercenaries.
Don’t let anyone take your passport.
To add an addendum to rule 3, never put your President and Foreign Minister in the same helicopter or small aircraft. Especially if doing so in bad weather conditions. Especially if you're already under threat from a hostile nuclear power in the region with a proclivity for terrorism (though this probably isn't Israel's doing, in this particular case).
Anyway, Azerbaijan. Not a great country, I think. Did some genocides. They're a petrostate that is hosting Cop29, which I suppose is a way for the bourgeoisie to implicitly convey their contempt for the green movement. They got weapons from Israel, too.
Just for the record, there's an Iranian province called East Azerbaijan, which is not the same as Azerbaijan.
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 Azerbaijan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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.
Denmark's succdem-led right-wing regime supports an independence Palestine — at some point in the distant future.
When asked whether Denmark should follow the lead of Norway, Ireland and Spain and join the consensus among the international community on Palestinian sovereignty, foreign minister and boozed-up grifting centrist Lars Løkke Rasmussen rejected, giving the following reason:
That decision is reserved for a situation where there is a state. To be a state, you need to have a territory you control and some authorities that can control it. And that's not exactly the situation right now.
If you squint really hard you can kind of see the contours of a good-faith argument based on a realist theory of stratehood. But don't be misled, the man is a scoundrel who would rather see thousands of non-white children burn then he would upset his masters in Washington.
He then goes on to do the liberal sleight of hand where he says something that sounds like the opposite of what he's actually saying. In this case he's making "we'll never recognise Palestine" sound like he actually wants to go just that:
We reserve it for that day, or for a time when there is an irreversible peace process that will surely lead there
He follows up with the usual phrases about supporting a "two-state solution", the thing literally nobody wants but who has become the go-to thought-terminating cliché for liberals who doesn't want people to get mad at them.
Rasmussen describes what he sees as the issues preventing the imagined "irreversible peace prices":
Right now, we have a Hamas in Gaza that does not want any two-state solution. They want to eradicate Israel. We have a government in Israel that also doesn't seem to have much appetite for a two-state solution,
So actually both sides are bad. One side is worse than the other though as it wants to "eradicate" the other whereas the other simply don't have "much appetite" for a lukewarm liberal compromise. Rasmussen doesn't seem to wonder how it can be that the good side has a civilian body count orders of magnitude greater than the bad side.
Instead of recognising Palestine, Rasmussen wants to "use his efforts differently", namely to:
… promote a process where we get people to meet with each other in the same room. And yes, it is a Danish ambition and has been for 10 years, that the day can come when we can recognize Palestine.
If just the victims and the perpetrators of the genocide could talk it all out and find a compromise, and if just that commentary could be guaranteed to work flawlessly until the heat death of the universe, then maybe, some day the Danish government could be arsed to recognise Palestine.
That decision is reserved for a situation where there is a state. To be a state, you need to have a territory you control and some authorities that can control it. And that's not exactly the situation right now.
denying the legitimacy of any government-in-exile from WWII