Image is sourced from this article depicting the 28th ASEAN Plus Three Summit, which took place at the same time as the 47th ASEAN Summit.
Last week concluded the 47th summit of ASEAN in Malaysia as well as a swathe of concurrent summits surrounding ASEAN. For those unfamiliar, formally, China is not a member of ASEAN, but is part of the ASEAN Plus Three (as part of the “Three”, alongside Japan and Occupied Southern Korea). And while not really ASEAN, there is also a yet wider organization, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which tacks on Australia and New Zealand to the group of countries that are currently in ASEAN (which is the single largest trade bloc on the planet). At the summit, Timor-Leste was officially introduced into ASEAN, making it the 11th country to do and the first since Cambodia in 1999.
Many important figures throughout Asia, as well as Trump, Ramaphosa, and Lula, attended the event. As you can imagine, Trump’s appearance was not exactly positive - signing four rather coerced bilateral deals there, including with Malaysia, which forced those countries to buy American goods in exchange for certain exemptions from Trump’s high tariff regime. The US is currently in a bit of a panic due to China restricting access to rare earths, a critical component of many weapons technologies (and electronics in general) and is looking around for countries to help supply them. After the summit, the US and China signed a deal related to tariffs and rare earths, but it seems very unlikely that this is the end of the saga; the US politically, economically, and militarily cannot tolerate China’s existence as a sovereign actor and will try to overcome them until the American Empire topples.
Meanwhile, China did as they ordinarily do, and urged higher regional integration and trade without high tariffs, as well as adherence to the Global Governance Initiative (which, as we here never tire of noting, is an interesting thing to try and encourage while the US only more feverishly violates the sovereignty of nations everywhere). One hopes they’re supplying a bit more than just speeches to Venezuela, Cuba, and beyond, as the US prepares to start bombing.
Last week’s thread is here.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
I like how NATO leftists are suddenly bringing up how brutal Venezuela is with links to HRW and Wikipedia. There’s also the occasional “my gf/wife/ partner(it’s always a woman) is Venezuelan and says they suck”
Fucking jokes.
Edit: congrats to Mamdani though. I wish I could see Cuomo’s sagging jowls hanging to the side of his open mouth as he stares in disbelief at the results showing his loss.
I’ve run into “I’m from a family of Russian immigrants who escaped brutal communist repression” types, mostly nepo-baby dipshits in the DC area. The repression was when their Russian aristocrat great-grandpappy was forced to downsize from 10 mansions to 5 and his private chef cooked the eggs wrong on his first class trip to the US.
Even ignoring that, it’s still amazing how Amerikkkan crackers think the fact that their great-great grandparents who died 80 years before they were born lived in X country (that they’ve never set foot in) until age 5 somehow gives them the inherent authority to talk about it as if they have any more connection to the “mother country” than any random asshole on the street. They unironically believe in genetic memory through blood quantum percentages. Crackers refuse to shut the fuck up about muh ancestry
“I’m 18.269% Scottish 15.225% Belgian and 152.6825% Lithuanian” no the fuck you’re not, you’re an Amerikkkan hog that cosplays as a Euro once a year by making shitty Americanized “traditional dishes” that you googled the night before making
I found out the other day that my great grandad was executed by the Spanish reds during the civil war. My gut reaction was “fuck, he prolly had it coming, I hate that my ancestors are fascists”, not “omg omg my family was oppressed by gommunism!!”
The DC Russians don’t even have a firing squad to complain about, when these types talk about “communist oppression” they mean their family fled the country with their stolen wealth instead of letting it be redistributed. They love their completely unverifiable gulag stories too. Can’t give the titles bc I don’t want to dox myself by proxy, but I know this one nepo kid who failed-up all the way through law school (with a blank-check credit card from mommy and daddy) and has gotten several books published (with the assistance of their publisher-connected dad) about the life of his poor great-grandpappy. There are zero sources for any of the claims other than his cousin’s dad’s ex-wife and the like.
He still complains about how much his family suffered despite the fact that he can live a life so comfortable that it’s beyond imagination for almost everyone, writing poorly-written books read only by his dad, while complaining about his fake consulting job (his first job ever, at age 25) his dad got him because he sometimes has to answer an email.
I don’t bring this up in everyday conversations, because it is honestly not relevant to who I am as a person, but my family was personally harmed by the Freikorps. I don’t run around demanding reparations for something that happened to my great grandparents and I don’t let that define me as a person. For the sake of highlighting the hypocrisy I guess it’s appropriate for me to mention tho’ because I do find it interesting how they justify it as “regrettable necessary evil.”
My father throwing slurs at my Babushka for being “Russian” normal also. She’s not even from Russia, her family’s from Belarus
My biggest gripe with the gung-ho euro heritage people is they still believe in the Wilsonian fiction. They think the evidently failed division of Europe post-WWII on the general basis of one nation-state per ethnicity (which didn’t work out that way in reality, because of course it couldn’t have) is an observation of reality and not a man-made division. They think the post-Versailles European order is the be-all and end-all. Everything can be put into neat little boxes where you can mix-and-match ethnicities with percentages down to 1/10ths. Especially with these DNA tests, it’s made the problem 1000x worse (in addition to handing your entire extended family’s genetic data over to the US government); now you can assign percentages of your DNA to specific nation-states based on “pure” specimens. It just reeks of race-mixing “science”. Notions of ethnicity have never been as simple as the flattened modern-day easily defined ethnicity with a set language, national dish (because “nation” is used interchangeably with “ethnicity”), national dress, etc. The modern nation-state with clearly defined borders and customs inspections and singular ethnicities, dishes, dresses, etc. did not fully exist until after WWI. Americans’ conception of heritage and ethnicity is almost entirely a fiction invented in the early 20th century.
But you can still be materially affected by the oppression suffered by your family in the past even if you never actually met them. The things that happened to your great-grandparents still happened to them no matter what, but I’ve observed that by the 4th generation, there tends to be little left of any connection with the “mother country” aside from a last name. For example, with the Russian aristocrat nepo-babies. They are just as knowledgeable about Russia and are just as much in-tune culturally as Joe Smith whose ancestors all came from Southern England. Even if genetic blood quantum memory were a thing, the last time anyone in their families set foot in Russia was a hundred and eight years ago. But it’s not real, so everything they know comes from unverifiable anecdotes from embittered counterrevolutionaries passed down through a 108-years-long game of telephone, meshed with whatever nonsense they learned in Good Old Boys’ Private College Preparatory for Fancylads to create a sense of “knowing” Russian history despite actually knowing less than a random kid who skimmed the wikipedia page.
No, see, they were also harmed by communism because they should have received a much larger inheritance. It’s unfair! They deserve a life of idle privilege as an aristocrat, not this hard life of occasional office work for a NED-funded NGO.
Hey, in my experience it’s been Catholic priests from Venezuela (or who were in the country for some time) who say it’s horrible. Men can be gusanos too
I think what @Frogmanfromlake@hexbear.net is saying is that the people manking arguments from vulgar “identity politics” (Maduro is bad, this is true because X person is Venezuelan and says so) are choosing women as examples because it makes their regime change propaganda seem more “progressive”.