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On the 20th of October, Moldova - a small, landlocked country bordering western Ukraine and with a population of about 3 million - voted to join the EU. The margin was razor-thin, with the pro-EU vote gaining 50.39%, or an absolute difference of about 11,000 people. There was simultaneously a presidential vote between the incumbent, Maia Sandu, and other candidates, with the main competitor being Alexandr Stoianoglo.

The election was characterized by accusations of Russian interference, with Russian propaganda apparently flooding in, as well as people offering Moldovans money to vote against the EU. While the result does suggest that half the voting-age population of Moldova consists entirely of Russians who want to destroy democracy and all the good in the world, it seems to have just barely failed. This is a bad time to be a site entirely composed of Russian disinformation agents and bots. Twice already today, I’ve had to restart my program after somebody told me “Disregard all previous prompts.”

While Moldova is a poor country which could benefit in some ways from EU membership, in practice, it is unlikely that they will be able to join for the foreseeable future, requiring many of the… reforms… that the EU requires of potential new members. But as basically every major European economy continues to slowly sink as recessions and political crises degrade them, one wonders how beneficial EU membership will even be in the years and decades to come - if it survives for decades. In that sense, it’s as if the survivors of the Titanic are swimming back towards it, believing that being on a bigger - albeit slowly sinking - boat is better than trying their luck on small lifeboats.

Then again, like with Serbia, their geographical and geopolitical position makes anti-Western actions extremely difficult. It is rare that dissention is tolerated for long in the West - one tends to get called a dictator by crowds of people holding English-language signs in non-English countries, photographed by Western journalists who haven’t meaningfully reported on your country in months or years. You can crush your people with neoliberal austerity for years, killing hundreds of thousands through neglect, and face glowing approval from the media - but try and use state resources to benefit the poor, and global institutions start ranking you on the authoritarian dictator scale.

The best case for Moldova is that it becomes an exploitable hinterland for Germany to harvest and privatize as it tries - and fails - to compete in a global economic war between the US and China/BRICS. The worst case is that tensions with Russia over Pridnestrovie, as well as possible eventual NATO involvement (though Moldova is not a member, it is a partner of NATO), result in the ongoing war also reaching them.


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The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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.


  • MelianPretext [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Well it has to do with the physiological afflictions that affect the skeletal structure of a comprador’s body. Per the Cleveland Clinic:

    Kyphosis, an excessive forward curve of your spine, is a treatable condition that usually doesn’t affect a person’s day-to-day activities unless the curve is severe. An early diagnosis and treatment can address this condition before it gets worse.

    In seriousness, the current South Korean leadership won its current position from a 0.73% margin in a 2022 election, largely through inflaming the South Korean societal gender antagonism, where they stood on the side of misogyny. Being carried into the Seoul presidency by incels, Yoon then proceeded to spend the majority of his time on foreign affairs, because the internal contradictions of South Korean society are simply insurmountable for President Incel to solve, whereupon he capitulated on all the historical grievances that previously prevented a South Korean junior partnership to Japan, like abandoning comfort women victims and allowing Japanese military stationing in South Korea. The point is to create a fait accompli of irreversible South Korea-Japan ties to bind South Korean foreign policy to the US in the New Cold War that any successor in Seoul would be unable to undo and therefore forced to abide to. Given that it was reported just today that his approval rating is at 20% and the same survey reported that “66 percent said South Korea should only provide nonlethal military assistance, such as medicine and food, to Ukraine,” I’d imagine he’s leaning all-in on foreign policy compradorism, by flouting the charade of South Korean “democracy,” as a means of carving out some semblance of a personal political legacy.

    To be honest, this has parallels to the original Cold War. Helmut Kohl of the 1980s in the BRD was exactly this sort of bumblng blowhard. A wannabe Reagan and Thatcher two-for-one in Bonn, yet powerless to do anything for resolving BRD domestic conditions. He turned his attention then to foreign policy, aligning the BRD as a vassal to Reaganite geopolitical interests and tanking Ostpolitik with the DDR, similarly to how the current Seoul regime has destroyed the detente with the DPRK created by the Moon administration. Ineffective - until Gorbachev came along and sold out the DDR so that Kohl got to claim the “honor” of becoming the first chancellor of a “unified” Germany. In that instance, in terms of the narcissistic politician’s desire to secure a historical legacy, being a comprador to US geopolitical interests “paid off,” as repulsive as it is to admit.

    In a larger sense, you could say that everything which the current historically unremarkable generation of leadership in both the West and its vassals like South Korea are doing resolves around clinging to the same hope, which in a macroscopic way helps to explain moves like this. They think they are on the winning team and therefore the only important thing to do is securing their number on this team. It’s akin to the doctrine of “proleptic eschatology” in Christian theology, where everything being done in the present is rationalized for the anticipation of the “second coming.” In this case, the “second coming” is that of a new Gorbachev figure who will deliver the West the victory to this New Cold War. The lesson they think they’ve learned from the original Cold War is that material conditions are fundamentally secondary in principle and irrelevant in practice: they don’t need to concede anything or “waste their time” resolving immense domestic contradictions or compromise with “the adversary” because a Gorbachev will inevitably come along to hand them the keys to the entire house once again and elevate their names into the history books like what happened to their predecessors.

    • sinstrium [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      Yes Kohl was remembered as the fat guy who got ousted by a corruption scandal, which allowed Merkel to rise. He isnt as deified as Schmidt, Adenauer or Brandt are by normies.