Image is sourced from this Guardian article.

The Pope’s fucking dead.

He gave JD Vance three chocolate easter eggs, exchanged pleasantries for 17 minutes, and then keeled over and died.

What a way to go.

Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

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.

  • grandepequeno [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    53·
    5 days ago

    pseudorca Some people expect the next pope to follow in Francis’ steps since he appointed so many electors. I hope they’re right, but I just read some counter-arguments in this piece which I think are worth sharing.

    It is difficult to predict the outcome of the forthcoming conclave. However, there are strong reasons to believe that Francis’s successor will be a more conservative pope. First, his pontificate has been highly transformative, both institutionally and in its public messaging, making it unlikely that the cardinals will choose another candidate equally inclined toward reform. The Church tends to resist radical and sustained change.

    Perhaps more importantly, although the Sistine Chapel has thick walls, the Vatican is invariably influenced by global political trends. With Trump in the White House, and with the far right on the rise worldwide, electing another pope as progressive as Francis would be swimming against the tide – and the Vatican has a long history of adapting to changing realities rather than confronting them. That is why the next fumata blanca will likely announce a more conservative figure than Jorge Bergoglio. Indeed, the mood of the moment suggests that he may well be a stark antithesis to the ‘leftist’ pope.

    So the arguments are that, since Francis was a transformative pope, it’s not likely that they’ll elect another pope that’s transformative in the same manner since that would entail too much transformation for the church too quickly.

    And that, in 2013 electing a progressive pope seemed apt for the time, but in 2025 with the far-right on the rise, it would be against the current trend, so it’s likely they’ll ride the wave and elect a conservative or even, god help up, a far right pope.

    Hope whoever wrote this is wrong, whatever one may think about the catholic church, it was politically useful for me to be able to say “well the pope agrees with me, you brain dead warmonger” whenever I argued with liberals who wanted to keep the ukraine war going.

    Also something I found interesting in the piece.

    As Gerard O’Connell recounts in his book on the 2013 conclave, The Election of Pope Francis, the then-Archbishop of Buenos Aires gained popularity among prelates for his strong stance on financial transparency – a sensitive issue following the Vatileaks revelations.

    So the electors in 2013 warmed up to Frances not so much because of his leftish credentials but moreso for his anti-corruption stance. This checks with the idea I’ve heard that since he only had 1 lung, they probably didn’t expect him to live that long and to change anything.

    • CleverOleg [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      32·
      5 days ago

      and with the far right on the rise worldwide

      This is some “only the Global North really matters” type of thinking (I mean the author of the article, not you OP). Sure, fascism is on the rise in the US and Western Europe (and maybe some adjacent areas like Argentina or Poland)… but this isn’t necessarily true in the rest of the world. And I think the Catholic Church is pivoting to the Global South anyway. It’s sound logic that they may not want a further reformer, but I don’t buy the argument I quoted.

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        16·
        5 days ago

        Absolutely true. Oh the US is fascist? What else is new? Mexico and Brazil have leftist presidents, there’s a ton of populist pressure in South Korea, China has a huge growing Church and they are as communist as ever. If the next Pope is a moderate on Gaza, will the billion Catholics that already heard Francis call the Zionists terrorists forget? Or are we going to be extremely alienated?

      • Lemister [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        13·
        5 days ago

        You are correct in seeing that Europe is becoming less important to the Catholic church (massive amounts of people in ireland, germany, spain, italy are leaving the church due to abuse scandals)

        Liberation theory however is mostly restricted to Latin America (and even there it isn’t universally). A lot of cardinals from catholic africa are very conservative.

    • darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      18·
      5 days ago

      Pretty much my thinking. The Vatican isn’t going to paint a target on themselves, the chic thing of corporations (and Vatican is just one big child abusing, criminal corporation in a sense) trying to pretend to be woke and progressive has been tossed aside. Some parts of Europe are still clinging to a veneer of it but the far right is rising rapidly even in France and I think that within 5-8 years at most you have much more reactionary governments in power across Europe and the Vatican won’t want a pope that’s out of step on that.

      The fact also is the idea that Francis vetted these people and made sure they were ideologically committed to his way of thinking seems a bit spurious, it is so like the rad-lib to want to have variety, to accept reactionary people to the right of your position because they’re with you on one particular thing or they seem on a personal level to be likeable and not horribly corrupt and a true believer at least. So I would not be surprised if even without the shifting global trends that happened.

      Francis was notably picked in 2013, that was in Obama’s second term, world-wide there was this propaganda feeling that America had made a decidedly progressive permanent turn by electing a black man not once but twice and so they wanted to follow on with that. Now with Trump, with the rise of “trad” among the incel-o-sphere and man-o-sphere among young guys, with the alignment of the big corporations with Trump with the big tech bourgeoisie literally lining up behind him it would make sense to put in someone more appropriate for that setting.

      Probably a pope that’s more outspoken on calling trans people evil because that’s a popular thing now unfortunately. And maybe even one who is willing to be openly anti-China and help lead the religious proles on a crusade against the Asiatic communist power. Because let’s be honest, with all the secret society shit, the ties between the Vatican and European aristocracy and bourgeoisie it’s hard to believe there aren’t powerful people not at all affiliated with the church weighing in on the choice and what they NEED to see in who the next pick is with the electors before they go into seclusion.

      • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        11·
        5 days ago

        The fact also is the idea that Francis vetted these people and made sure they were ideologically committed to his way of thinking seems a bit spurious, it is so like the rad-lib to want to have variety

        As far as radlib analogies go, it is more like the post-2016 cope that our progressive liberal lord and savior, Barack Obama, was doing a trust fall into the arms of America’s institutions and that there was no long-term danger in handing the keys over to Trump.

    • Lemister [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      12·
      5 days ago

      There is like a not-insignificant faction of very conservative catholics in france, the United States and most importantly africa, which is the local in which the constituents of the church is most strongly increasing in numbers. Especially to combat the evangelicals who have been spreading like wildfire trying to erase „paganism“ in africa.

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      5 days ago

      I think if Parolin or Turkson are selected then this author would be vindicated. I still think Tagle, Zuppi, or Pizzaballa are more likely than any of the moderates, though.