Bulletins and News Discussion from December 2nd to December 8th, 2024 - May A Hundred Hazel Flowers Bloom - COTW: Russia
Bulletins and News Discussion from December 2nd to December 8th, 2024 - May A Hundred Hazel Flowers Bloom - COTW: Russia
Image is of one of the six salvos of the Oreshnik missile striking Ukraine.
The Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile that appears to split into six groups of six submunitions as it strikes its target, giving it the appearance of a hazel flower. It can travel at ten times the speed of sound, and cannot be intercepted by any known Western air defense system, and thus Russia can strike and conventionally destroy any target anywhere in Europe within 20 minutes. Two weeks ago, Russia used the Oreshnik to strike the Yuzhmash factory in Ukraine, particularly its underground facilities, in which ballistic missiles are produced.
Despite the destruction caused by the missile, and its demonstration of Russian missile supremacy over the imperial core, various warmongering Western countries have advocated for further reprisals against Russia, with Ukraine authorized by the US to continue strikes. Additionally, the recent upsurge of the fighting in Syria is no doubt connected to trying to stretch Russia thin, as well as attempting to isolate Hezbollah and Palestine from Iran; how successful this will have ended up being will depend on the outcome of the Russia and Syrian counteroffensive. Looking at recent military history, it will take many months for the Russians and Syrians to retake a city that was lost in about 48 hours.
Even in the worst case scenario for Hezbollah, it's notable that Ansarallah has had major success despite being physically cut off from the rest of the Resistance and under a blockade, and it has defeated the US Navy in its attempts to open up the strait. Israel has confirmed now that their army cannot even make significant territorial gains versus a post-Nasrallah, post-pager terrorist attack Hezbollah holding back its missile strike capabilities. In 2006, it also could not defeat a much less well-armed Hezbollah and was forced to retreat from Lebanon.
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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 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.
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.
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
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Alright I said I would do a shortish thing about the upcoming german elections so here goes:
There's been
34 (one new one came in just as I started writing this) polls during the last few days so I'll just go by their numbers:Party Forsa GMS INSA Yougov Union (Christian Conservatives) 32% 34% 31.5% 30% AfD (Nazis) 18% 17% 18.5% 19% SPD (Center Right Soc Dems) 16% 15% 16% 18% Greens (Center Right Greens) 12% 13% 13% 13% BSW (PatSocs) 4% 6% 6% 7% FDP (Neolib) 3% 4% 4.5% 4% Die Linke (Soc Dems) 4% 3% 3.5% 3% Randoms 11% 6% 5.5% 6% Alright we got numbers now how do they look....
In Germany you got a electoral threshold of 5% meaning if you get below 5% you can't get into parliament, this means that it's not unlikely that there would only be 4 parties represented in parliament after this election with around 20% of the votes being effectively thrown out. Voter participation is around 75% (Last election 76.4% but a few years before that 70.8%). So Parliament represents 60% of all Germans. Now with all of that out of the way we can talk about movements and malaise.
Shouldn't be too hard to tell but SPD during the period where they were able to govern collapsed, this is a trend that is probably just going to continue but it is remarkable just how shitty this iteration of Center Right Soc Dems is because polling at 16-18% is a historic low, my guess is just glancing at past elections that they'll not recover from this and become a 15% political party in the near future because of how colossal the shift to the right under Scholz was. Now to Union, they have recovered from the terrible result last time and are now sitting roughly where they've been the last few election cycles.
AfD looks to almost double their voter percentage from last time, they had their start in 2013 because of the syrian civil war as a 'anti-Merkel' party but they've gone away from that to try and be more chummy with the Union to get into power but kept all the other right wing outright nazi shit. I cannot state that enough they keep doing Nazi dog whistles and it's pretty fucking obvious that they are cryptonazis.
Greens they are down a bit but have been able to grow from their usual 6-7% they used to be at probably because they have a ton of atlantacists and pro-US people in their party I mean Baerbock is literally a former member of the german marshall fund think tank that's funded by the US. So Greens? Funded and supported by the US pass it on.
BSW, Sahra Wagenknecht used to be in Die Linke has made her own party that is the most likely to actually make it into the Bundestag of the small ones. Was able to grab votes by being anti war in ukraine. US scepticism and some literal Pat Soc stuff, media has been talking about her being funded by Putin and her being a Putin shill, unlikely that she'll be able to do anything if her party makes it into parliament.
FDP are more than likely out. It was unlikely that they would've made it but a few days ago an internal memo was leaked that detailed their plans to blow up the coalition and the most opportune time to do it. Worst of all? It had the Title 'D-Day Ablaufszenarien und Maßnahmen' which everyone rightly mocked. They've been getting dragged by civility people for being backstabbers, my guess is they'll not be a factor for a few cycles then go back to their 10% they can reliably grab with their deep pockets.
Die Linke, it's fucking dead it's not coming back it's over.
Most of the movements done so onto the malaise:
'Which party is best suited to deal with the problems of Germany?'
So 3 years ago 45% would've said no party we are now at 55% which has improved a bit compared to the 60% at the start of the year because for some reason thing Union is going to fix it oh well. This number will grow because well things are going to get a lot more shitty.
Because the two big topics for germans are the russian-ukranian war and the economy. Which is why you have Scholz doing photo-ops in ukraine and Merz (Union) saying stuff like 'We are finally going to be strong again and spend money on our military'. For the normal german person how do they see the economy? Well 16% think the economy is going to get better, a number that has gone steadily down, while 60% of germans think it's going to get worse, a number that keeps going up, and 22% think that the situation is shitty but it won't change.
So why malaise? Well this is just going to be my prediction but we will see a repeat of the GroKo (Greater Coalition/Union-SPD) we saw under Merkel, but this time under Merz a incredibly and openly corrupt politician so get ready for this one, Union is going to be able to do whatever because of the looming threat of AfD so SPD 'has to' chose the lesser evil. The coalition will push a huge amount of austerity onto the people during a recession which as we all know from every other country this has been done to, is really good.
What is the likelihood of CDU allying themselves with the Nazis?
I think it's highly unlikely allying with the AfD would be long term disastrous for them since their current strategy is going 'Why are you voting for AfD you are just throwing your vote away since no one will form a government with you. You should vote for us out of strategic interest.'
Plus SPD will throw themselves at the CDU and would allow everything you want anyways while the Nazis might make demands. Again Scholz the current leader was part of the previous cabinet under Merkel as the finance minister, and considering he is still the top guy it'll happen I'm like 95% sure. The other 5% is you don't have a working government (4%) and they will ally with the nazis (1%) and neither of those make the threshhold.
I could see the CDU reforming government kicking the SPD out and getting the AfD in at some later point but def not right now.
What's the effect of this on Electorships? Will CDU try to force Emperor Karl Franz to make peace with Kislev?
Karl Franz will summon the elector counts but I doubt anything will come of it.
AfD will probably get more votes than this. Not every AfD voter will publicly say that they're one. Plus these polls are generally manipulated to meet agendas. (Speaking from personal experience in India.)
Probably, shy nazis are a thing but even then unless they outperform by a ton like say they get 35%+ it'll probably have no different effect on policy because so far it goes like this already. AfD proposes nazi shit -> CDU dresses up the nazi shit a bit -> SPD passes it by dressing it up a bit again. Like it needs to be at a level where Union would have to include both SPD and Greens for it to be a factor imo.
oh you got 4%? NO VOTES FOR YOU