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.
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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.
Democrats say they aren’t worried about the “Uncommitted” campaign because it isn’t garnering that much support, when in reality people will just sit out the election if they don’t like your candidate.
Funny enough, this always makes me think of an episode of Kitchen Nightmares where Gordon Ramsay once said something that really stuck with me. A restaurant was failing due to the low quality of its food, and people were sending their food back to the kitchen saying that it was no good. The owner/chef were shocked because they said this never happens, and it must just be because Gordon Ramsay was there influencing their decision. Ramsay said that in the restaurant business, almost all restaurants stay afloat due to repeat customers. He went on to say that it may be true that people are sending food back now because they know he’s here, but on a normal day it’s different. If you go out to eat and the food is low quality, the vast majority of people don’t send food back, they just never come back to your restaurant.
This so perfectly encapsulates how the “Uncommitted” vote in the Democrat primaries is actually an underrepresentation of people who will not vote for Biden on Election Day. It is much more difficult to go out to a predetermined primary election and vote for nobody than it is to simply stay home and not vote at all.
Democrats will lose a sizable chunk of voters as a result of this election cycle, many of them forever. This alienation event is almost certainly going to be larger than the Bernie 2016 and 2020 events, and is probably going to be the largest since NAFTA. If you are a young person, it is just so blatantly obvious that democrats have almost no policy overlap with you.
it’s insane to me that it’s not defcon 1 time in bidenland over his performances. he didn’t even crack 70% in minnesota and hawaii! you’d probably have to go back to carter to see numbers that bad for an incumbent, and carter was actually being fucking challenged by a serious candidate! if i was a higher up and serious about winning in november i’d put some grease in the white house shower or something i’d be doing ANYTHING to get biden out of there but no one seems to give a shit
it is going to be so interesting to watch the libs reaction if trump wins in a landslide… we can be rest assured they will blame the left and this will be their common cause with trump lmao
Them blaming the left could be leveraged in the service of good. If genocide Joe loses and the established wisdom ends up being that it was the left’s fault that means that the left has the power to end the democrat party’s electoral ambitions. And that power can be utilised to demand concessions if they want to win back leftist voters.
Liberals don’t have long enough memories for this to work in the USA, we’re blamed when they lose and always disregarded as inconsequential when they win
They don’t really give a shit because they make more in donations when they’re not in power, and all the dipshits around him have absolutely no political vision they’re trying to achieve. They just want money.
i’ve heard that before a lot re: donations and i’d have to imagine they make more from lobbyists while they’re in power than they do from donations while they aren’t. i do think you are right about the no political vision thing though, the party isn’t really a party anymore and no one has any actual reasons to want to be in charge other than to say they were. what decades of the ratchet effect and neoliberalism will do i guess
I am just looking at like 2020 primary numbers vs 2024 on super tuesday, take MA for example, lib central:
I get that it was a contested primary, but going from 1.4 million primary votes in 2020
to 600k in 2024, seems like a bad sign. Uncommitted got more votes than ratboy did last time!
This is wild. I would imagine you shed some turnout for an incumbent, but this is a reduction over 50%. My vibes based analysis to this point expected this, but the results are so much more extreme
It wouldn’t be that unreasonable to see a quite significant drop in turnout for a de facto uncontested election compared to one where the winner was not known in advance. Back in 2020 there was a reason to vote and organisations had a reason to get out the vote for their candidate.
They are certainly talking about it a lot for something they aren’t worried about.
Democrats creeps yelling at me to vote or I’m destroying democracy really don’t seem desperate at all…