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.
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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 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.
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What’s the story with Moon of Alabama? I occasionally see posts linked here and in naked capitalism. The posts themselves seem ok but there seem to be a lot of nazis in the comments.
Hangout for anti-imperialist boomers, some of whom had history as far back as being involved in the anti-war protests during Vietnam.
The site has an explicit policy of non-moderation on ideological grounds. It’s a true melting pot with comments ranging from legitimate critique of capitalism (Michael Hudson occasionally comments there) to completely wacky anti-semitic conspiracy theory. A few resident Nazis there were well known and constantly dunked on by the other users. The comment section is certainly not for the faint hearted, but if ten brave Hexbear souls start posting there on the regular, I reckon you can change the discourse pretty easily.
And trust me, as someone who had followed the site over the years and quit a few times in between, the comment section in general has gotten way better since the Ukraine war started. The worst was during the whole Kyle Rittenhouse debacle and the site had a completely normal one, with like half of the people weirdly supporting the court decision that ruled in favor of Rittenhouse, and lots of emotional and angry spats were exchanged among the commentator base (not unlike our own struggle sessions here, honestly). It was the only time I saw people getting banned from the site. I don’t remember much else except that I got so fed up I left the site and didn’t go back until the Ukraine war started.
Yeah we could easily dwarf the comments if we wanted to, in fact i’m kind of disappointed we dont brigade stuff often, theres literally so many of us, we could bend discourse whenever wherever we wanted, maybe we could make a com dedicated to it or something? Or idk maybe its kind of pointless since 90% of the internet is fake
I'm not sure if the mods are okay with it. That said, I would enjoy brigading some places and preaching the good word of Lenin to libs and chuds alike. Seriously, if you think about making it a comm, go for it. At worst, it's a nice way to kill time for people and blow off some steam.
Then again, I'm not 100% sure if this is a wise idea. It would be fun, though, especially if there is some degree of organization behind it. My worry is mostly the potential for blowback, tbh. Gotta pick the targets in coordination with mods maybe. Get a hunting pass for different places on the internet and websites.
Im not pretending brigading would be real praxis but it could shape the discourse on some places on the internet in a more positive direction. Just my 2 cents.
There is little to no moderation on the comment section (MoA, I mean), at least on ideological grounds. You’re free to dunk on any reactionaries you see there, so long as you’re not explicitly making violent threats and such. However, I would suggest using a VPN to prevent your IP from being logged.
Can we brigade the transphobes on Naked Capitalism too?
Not worth the psychic damage tbh
Eh, depends. Some of us enjoy dunking on libs and chuds out in the wild, especially when there's a comrade or three around to back us up. I've often thought how great it would be if we had a brigade comm, especially back when federation was new and we got constantly accused of it anyway.
That's why we go dark mode to neutralize it.
if ten brave Hexbear souls start posting there on the regular, I reckon you can change the discourse pretty easily.
I'd be down to join a group and do some daily activity.
Would be very easy to post some of the activity here and get many involved.
If the policy is non-moderation I see no reason not to use the same usernames as here to make it explicitly clear.
I’m totally going to do this, just need to think of a name that hexbears will catch on to, like OutdoorCat or something.
Hey
The founding contributors are basically anti- Iraq War bloggers, basically leftists although more in the sense of being anti-imperialists and calling out the US economy as being structurally anti-working class.
As for why the comment section there is so toxic… I guess being anti-imperialist segues nicely with the isolationism of the nativist right and criticizing international finance and deep state can be mistaken for a dog whistle.
The posts themselves seem ok but there seem to be a lot of nazis in the comments.
Answered your own question there.
Its a lot like The Duran. They see themselves as classical Conservatives. They have lots of brain worms but they also do some decently rational analysis of current events. They think of themselves as being anti-imperialists and anti-woke liberals but if people like them ever got into power they would fall into fascism in a heart beat. They do see the situation clearly and have reasonable short term forward thinking but long term forward thinking gets all muddy because of their brain worms.
It’s not just conservatives. I have been following that site for a long time. Michael Hudson and Noam Chomsky are amongst those who said they read Moon of Alabama. The comment section is ideologically very diverse. There were (I haven’t been checking lately) at least a few users who regularly post Marxist theories and histories in the comments. Of course, they are the old school hard left types so expect some level of anti-LGBT brainworms, but it’s very important to understand that not everyone has the same ideological leanings on that site. Also there is a sizable portion of leftists from the developing world e.g. Latin America and Asia etc on that site too. They don’t exactly have the same views as the Western leftists you’d get from here.
MoA is a communist not a classical conservative. If you are reading the comments there you are doing it wrong, it’s the b blog site