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.
The Country of the Week is Pakistan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
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.
I see this talking point that Trump and Biden are essentially equivalent, and I personally think it might be true but it’s gonna be really hard to argue this to libs and if Trump ends up doing something awful you’re stuck holding the bag of i told you sos. But you don’t need to have Trump = Biden, because Trump is extremely and uniquely innocuous for a republican. Yeah this is also hard to swallow for libs but it’s almost an indisputable fact and you need only remind them of the deeds of what the last 3 republican presidents did and ask them to produce examples that are worse.
So if there was every a time to hold a Democrat president to account, now would be it because the next Republican will not only be worse than Trump but probably worse than a Bush or Reagan, they’ll be just as evil but will have learned from Trump (and Biden lol) that they don’t even have to pretend that hard, in fact not pretending makes them more powerful. And aside from punishing the Dems for completely ignoring their base, we’re very likely to get a republican in either 2024 or 2028, but not both years, like 4 years of either Trump or Biden and people are gonna want a change. So likely choices are 1) Biden 2024 / Satan but worse 2028, 2) Trump 2024 / Probably at least not Satan 2028. See, utilitarianism is good actually.
Biden MUST lose, hate to say it but if I lived in a swing state I would literally mark Trump on my ballot
I don’t think voting for Trump is advisable in any circumstances, even to own the most insufferable and genocidal libs, because it only confirms their fantasies about leftists being secretly Republican. I think it’s beet to just not vote or leave the top of the ticket blank.
As for what’s next for Republicans after Trump, I think the party as we know it will likely collapse. The prospect of a Haley or even DeSantis presidency is doomed because they have no charisma and are transparently nasty little teacher’s pets regardless of how much they try to channel Trump.
I actually can’t think of a single reactionary figure actually qualified to rival Trump in any way, the man is the Messiah for racist middle class whites and boomers because of his mannerisms and gaudy branding, nobody else is like that and we don’t live in a society that can produce more Trumps.
I don’t care about confirming fantasies of insufferable and genocidal libs, they will believe these fantasies regardless. As to whether society can produce like a more effective version of Trump, idk I feel like it’s not that hard. This hypothetical person doesn’t have to match Trump’s charisma, the bar is incredibly low, and they don’t have to be that smart either, just smart enough to fill their cabinet with non-clowns.
Bush, Ivy League Connecticut failson, managed to pull off “folksy southern charm”.
Trump is uniquely American, and his replacement will be as well. The exact qualities might be hard to define, predict, and replicate, but there can always be someone in this deranged country to take his place without the exact qualities that Trump has.
Kanye 2028
William Gass, 1995.
Based on their behavior since 2016 I don’t think it matters what we do or don’t do. They decided back in 2016 that we fucked over their queen, and they’ve not budged on that stance since. I don’t think we have any influence at all on the great seething scratched liberal mass of democrats.
With the Dems sprinting towards the right wing finish line, warmongering with China, exacerbating the war in ukraine, just openly using genocide as a geopolitical tool, stoking hatred of migrants and homeless people, if the GOP does collapse I think the Dems will just adopt any policies they haven’t adopted already.
I have not had any success whatsoever in budging libs on anything related to the current administration. Trump justifies everything. They don’t know about the genocide in Yemen. They’re very concerned about Russia and China. They cannot imagine any political action other than voting and at this point it’s purely a comfort blanket to save them from Trump.
I know it doesn’t seem like it but not all of them are the same, society isn’t as polarized as it claims to be, it’s an illusion! Okay cards on the table I’ve only convinced one lib to not vote Joe and they were family and they were already using the g word about gaza… still I fancy myself a lib whisperer and am therefore hyper qualified to give advice so, what you need to do is become them a bit first, rotate your talent for disagreeableness into finely honed debate skills, squint your eyes and imagine the eggs benedict and mimosas they shove to you at the crack of 11am is harmless pizza and whiskey, now you’re catching on good job
you see this a lot on the more socdem or even vaguely socialist subreddits that I visit once every week or two to gauge reactions to ongoing events. there’s a ton of genuine panic about things and basically every day there’s a post like “okay, but even if you thought voting didn’t do anything you’d STILL be wrong because… insert five paragraphs here” because I think people are starting to sink beneath the waves, either economically or socially, and are frantically grabbing onto anything within reach. It’s a natural reaction to the threat of drowning that I can’t deeply fault them for but it’s very difficult to convey to people who are in that state that the levers that they’re trying to pull at to change things simply aren’t connected to anything anymore, and haven’t been for… I mean, at least since Reagan.
If anybody’s ever played or watched the Stanley Parable, it’s like the ending where the protagonist is just stuck inside a facility that’s about to blow up and they’re trying to push buttons in a panic because some combination has to stop the sequence, and the narrator is mocking them for even trying, and it inevitably doesn’t work and the facility explodes. the buttons work about as much as voting does; it makes you feel like you’re doing something rather than nothing as you careen towards oblivion, because you can see no other possible method of escape. it is actually pretty remarkable how deeply the anti-communist instinct is programmed that even when these utterly desperate situations come along, many (but not all, of which many of us here are proof!) still go “no, that’s impossible, actually it would be even worse than if this entire building blew up with me inside it, I’m just gonna go back to frantically pressing buttons that I am perfectly aware do nothing whatsoever.” learned helplessness, I suppose.
When the libs say “The leftists are telling everyone not to vote because they believe that the revolution is magically going to happen because to them it’s the rapture because they’re unrealistic children”, while they’re trying to vote their way out of inescapable fascism while denouncing any other action as ridiculous, childish, impossible, or worse than fascism. It’s really pathetic, and it hurts seeing people you would want to be able to actually reason and think and make plans falling back on, more or less, religious fanaticism to save them instead of human agency. They don’t think any action is possible so they’re offering up blood sacrifices to the American Civil Religion because surely the institutions will save them?